This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Happiness does not come from possessions, but from our appreciation of them. It does not come from our work, but from our attitude toward that work. It does not come from success, but from the spiritual growth we attain in achieving that success." - Author Unknown NULL
"Sadness is a great obstacle to serving the Almighty. A person who has transgressed should not become excessively sad since this will prevent him from further spiritual growth. One should feel deep regret for the wrong he has done and then continue to feel joy in his relationship with the Almighty since he has sincere regret and is resolved not to repeat his transgression." -
"Almost all education has a political motive: It aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is the motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual beyond the grave; that all the laborers of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Change is inevitable but perpetual growth is a choice." - Bob Proctor
"As the years accumulate do you find yourself more sympathetic and tolerant, with a higher reverence for the nobility of your fellow men? That is the essential test of growth." - Bruce Barton
"I love you for what you are, but I love you yet more for what you are going to be. I love you not so much for your realities as for your ideals. I pray for your desires that they may be great , rather than for your satisfactions, which may be so hazardously little. A satisfied flower is one whose petals are about to fall. The most beautiful rose is one hardly more than a bud wherein the pangs and ecstasies of desire are working for larger and finer growth." - Carl Sandburg
"Conflicts bring experience; and experience brings that growth in grace which is not to be attained by any other means." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
"The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth." -
"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began." -
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Paul Abbey
"All change is not growth; all movement is not forward." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"Man's only legitimate end in life is to finish God's work - to bring to full growth the capacities and talents implanted in us." - Eric Hoffer
"The growth of bureaucracy is largely self-engendered, in the sense that only a small part of it derides from the real requirements of the function to be served, the greater part being the product of tendencies and pressures arising within the bureaucratic process." - George F. Kennan
"Sum up at night what thou hast done by day, and in the morning what thou hast to do; dress and undress thy soul; mark the decay or growth of it. If with thy watch that too be down, then wind up both. Since thou shalt be most surely judged, make thine accounts agree." - George Herbert
"All growth that is not towards God is growing to decay." - George MacDonald
"True friendship is a slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." - George Washington
"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." - George Washington
"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." - George Washington
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Love is not a possession but a growth." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Should we welcome the huge growth of the military budget at the expense of health, education, the needs of children, one fifth of whom grow up in poverty? I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her country might act on behalf of a different vision. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights." - Howard Zinn
"To nourish the soul means to become kinder, more compassionate, wiser, and more loving, often through the making of difficult choices that foster growth rather than safety." - Joan Borysenko
"Growth is the only evidence of life." - John Henry Newman
"[We] can best understand learning as growth, an expanding of ourselves into the world around us. We can also see that there is no difference between living and learning, that living is learning, that it is impossible, and misleading, and harmful to think of them as being separate." - John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
"[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"These men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more than the restraint of ten vicious." - John Milton
"Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." - John Stuart Mill
"Our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Our children’s growth: joyful learning or cultural conditioning? A child’s socialization, which can be characterized as learning in its most complete form, encouraging reflective thought, is instinctual and arises spontaneously on its own. Culture is something quite the opposite: an intellectual, arbitrary conditioning and enhancement of automatic reflexes that must be both induced and enforced." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"The worst is yet to come, however. Far more devastating that this pruning is that nature then brings about a corresponding increase of the connecting links of the emotional circuits in this cyngulate gyrus with the lower survival fight-or-flight structures of the amygdala, that neural module linked directly with our ancient defense and survival system in the reptilian brain. In this way, a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Faith in the creative process, in the dynamics of emergence, in the values and purposes that transcend past achievements and past forms, is the precondition of all further growth." - Lewis Mumford
"Life is growth - a challenge of environment. If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction, then this splendid balance of cosmic forces which we call life is on the road toward misfortune, misery and destruction. Therefore, health is the most precious of all things." - Luther Burbank
"If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments to spiritual growth will be overcome. If we do not, none of the others will be hurdled." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Love provides the motive, the energy for discipline. It is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own, or another's, spiritual growth." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"All occurrences of violence, negativity, conflict crisis, or problems in any society are just the expression of growth of stress in collective consciousness. When the level of stress becomes sufficiently great, it bursts out into large-scale violence, war, and civil uprising necessitating military action." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma
"In caring I experience the other as having potentialities and the need to grow. In helping the other grow I do not impose my own direction; rather, I allow the direction of the other's growth to guide what I do, to help determine how I am to respond." - Milton Mayeroff
"Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle." - Napoleon Hill
"The yen to become wanderers among the stars involves more than the need to satisfy a cosmic curiosity. Basically, it flows out of an instinctive need to evolve. We belong to an unfinished species. We have limitless capacities for growth; indeed, our uniqueness lies in our ability to steer our own evolution. The destination becomes visible through an enlarged perspective. The greatest adventure within the reach of a sentient species is seeing itself in an expanding relationship." - Norman Cousins
"The growth of the human mind is still high adventure, in many ways the highest adventure on earth." - Norman Cousins
"The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it." - Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
"The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The less government we have the better - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance." - Ralph Waldo Emerson