This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Prayer will enable you, sooner or later, to get yourself, or anyone else, out of any difficulty on the face of the earth. It is the Golden Key to harmony and happiness. To those who have no acquaintance with the mightiest power in existence, this may appear to be a rash claim, but it needs only a fair trial to prove that, without a shadow of doubt, it is a just one. You need take no one's word for it, and you should not. Simply try it for yourself, and see. God is omnipotent, and man is His image and likeness, and has dominion over all things. This is the inspired teaching, and it is intended to be taken literally, at its face value. Man means every man, and so the ability to draw on this power is not the special prerogative of the mystic or the saint, as is so often supposed, or even of the highly trained practitioner. Whoever you are, wherever you may be, the Golden Key to harmony is in your hand now. This is because in scientific prayer it is God who works, and not you, and so your particular limitations or weaknesses are of no account in the process. You are only the channel through which the divine action takes place, and your treatment will really be just the getting of yourself out of the way. Beginners often get startling results at the first time of trying, for all that is absolutely essential is to have an open mind, and sufficient faith to try the experiment. Apart from that, you may hold any views on religion, or none… We have said that the Golden Key is simple, and so it is, but, of course, it is not always easy to turn. If you are very frightened or worried it may be difficult, at first, to get your thoughts away from material things. But by constantly repeating some statement of absolute Truth that appeals to you, such as There is no power but God, or I am the child of God, filled and surrounded by the perfect peace of God, or God is love, or God is guiding me now, or, perhaps best and simplest of all, just God is with me -- however mechanical or dead it may seem at first -- you will soon find that the treatment has begun to "take," and that your mind is clearing. Do not struggle violently; be quiet but insistent. Each time that you find your attention wandering, just switch it straight back to God. Do not try to think out in advance what the solution of your difficulty will probably turn out to be. This is technically called "outlining," and will only delay the demonstration. Leave the ques tion of ways and means strictly to God. You want to get out of your difficulty -- that is sufficient. You do your half, and God will never fail to do His.
Action | Change | Life | Life | Prayer | Rest | Sense | Time |
God is still in business. All that you have to do is to realize the Presence of God where the trouble seems to be, to do your nearest duty to the very best of your ability; and to keep an even mind until the storm is over.
Action | Cause | Death | Eternal | God | Nothing | Present | Rest | God | Afraid | Child |
One of the first rules on the spiritual path is that you must attend strictly to your own business and not interfere with that of others. Your neighbor's life is sacred and you have no right to try to manage it for him. Let him alone. God has given him free will and self-determination, so why should you interfere? Many well-meaning people are constantly "butting in"" to their neighbors' lives without invitation. They pretend to themselves that their only desire is to help, but this is self-deception. It is really a desire to interfere. Interference always does more harm than good. Actually those who mind other people's business always neglect their own. The man who wants to put your house in order has always made a failure of his own life. M.Y.O.B. Of course, this does not mean that you are not to help people whenever you can; in fact, you should make it a rule to try to do at least one kind act every day; but you must do it without interfering or encroaching. When in doubt, claim Divine Guidance. It is always right to give your neighbor the right thought. Under any circumstances it can only do good to "Golden Key" him when you think of him. Don't fuss - God is running the universe.
Boasting | Business | Confidence | Destroy | Important | Inspiration | Kill | Law | Nature | People | Plan | Secrecy | Talking | Will | World | Business | Child |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The relation with the other will always be offering and gift, never an approach with ‘empty hands’.
Peace | Rest | Restlessness | Unity |
There is no more waste in preaching, than there has been in making an. atonement which is not received. The precious seed which, Sabbath after Sabbath, is thrown out upon the moral desert, which resists and sets at naught all the diligence of the husbandman, is not lost. It will bring forth fruit–the broad field upon which at last shall be gathered the sublime, and awful, and mysterious, and stirring magnificence of the end, is white unto the harvest. Every grain is there giving produce–every particle of gospel truth springs up and waves on that awful field. I preach for a testimony–oh! it is in feebleness I speak. I cannot throw might into my language. I cannot breathe words which shall take a lasting form and substance, and fall upon my worldly-minded hearers–but yet they die not. I seem already to hear their reverberation from a thousand echoes, louder and louder, and deeper and deeper, responding to the anthems of the saved, or the bitter and deep toned knell which shall be rung over lost spirits. God prepare us, my brethren, for the end.
For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer.
Circumstances | Earth | God | Light | Means | Mistake | Nature | Necessity | Principles | System | Waste | Will | God | Guilty |
Self-awareness does not precede apprehension of the world: one is not before the other; one is not without the other.
Nature | Need | Relationship | Unique |
The mystery of God’s providence is a most sublime consideration. It is easy to let our reason run away with itself. It is at a loss when it attempts to search into the eternal decrees of election or the entangled mazes and labyrinths in which the divine providence walks. This knowledge is too wonderful for us. Man can be very confident that God exercises the most accurate providence over him and his affairs. Nothing comes to pass without our heavenly Father. No evil comes to pass without his permissive providence, and no good without his ordaining providence to his own ends.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.
Rest |
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Better | Enlightenment | Experience | Learning | Rest | Will | Worth |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.
Ennius, fully Quintus Ennius NULL
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.
There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Character | Creativity | Death | Defense | Defiance | Dread | Failure | Insanity | Life | Life | Looks | Means | Men | Misfortune | Nature | Parents | People | Price | Reality | Sense | Style | Tragedy | Will | Wonder | World | Misfortune | Failure |
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"Excellence," besought Kai Lung, not without misgivings, "how many warriors, each having some actual existence, are there in your never-failing band?" "For all purposes save those of attack and defence there are fifteen score of the best and bravest, as their pay-sheets well attest," was the confident response. "In a strictly literal sense, however, there are no more than can be seen on a mist-enshrouded day with a resolutely closed eye."
Awareness | Body | Death | Dreams | Fate | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Order | Will | World | Fate | Awareness |
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the others, disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
Experience | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Understand |
No mistake about it: the curriculum in the "school" of anxiety is the unlearning of repression, of everything that the child taught himÂself to deny so that he could move about with a minimal animal equanimity. Kierkegaard is thus placed directly in the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Education for man means facing up to his natural impotence and death.42 As Luther urged us: "I say die, i.e., taste death as though it were present." It is only if you "taste" death with the lips of your living body that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die.
Nature |
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. ... What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.
Beginning | Courage | Death | Hero | Honor | Man | Nature | Terror | Thinkers | Valor | Valor |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I thought I had already paid for everything. Not like women who always pay and pay and pay. There is no principle of reward and punishment. Simple exchange of values. You give something and get something in return. Or do you work for something. Either way, you pay for everything that is worth something. I was redeemed your life a lot of things that I liked, and that's why I felt the joy of life. Things that give you joy of preparing, may be paid in several ways - knowledge, experience, exposure or money. To enjoy life, in order to learn about your money and get something nutritious to enjoy it consciously. Generally, it is possible. The world is a good store.