This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In youth, everything seems possible; but we reach a point in the middle years when we realize that we are never going to reach all the shining goals we had set for ourselves. And in the end, most of us reconcile ourselves, with what grace we can, to living with our ulcers and arthritis, our sense of partial failure, our less-than-ideal families - and even our politicians!
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Though sixteen civilizations may have perished already to our knowledge, and nine others may be now at the point of death, we - the twenty-sixty - are not compelled to submit the riddle of our fate to the blind arbitrament of statistics. The divine spark of creative power is still alive in us, and, if we have the grace to kindle it into flame, then the stars in their courses cannot defeat our efforts to attain the goal of human endeavor.
Death | Defeat | Fate | Grace | Knowledge | Power | Statistics | Fate |
One does not have to induce the divine Grace to flow, only to refrain from obstructing. There are two kinds of obstruction which prevent this and make the path long and arduous. They are distraction and attachment. Therefore, their opposites have to be cultivated; that is concentration and detachment.
Detachment | Grace |
Supreme Being is as impartial as the sun. If one flower bud opens when the run arise and another does not, it is due to its own preparedness and not to any partiality of the sun. Similarly, Divine Grace flows everywhere, always; it is only man’s willingness and ability to respond to it that varies. Supreme Being cannot be propitiated. Being all benevolence, it can not be induced to become more benevolent to one than to another or in one instance than in another. All things manifest Supreme Being in its innumerable aspects; all things issue forth from it and return to it.
Ability | Benevolence | Grace | Man | Partiality |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
It is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping stones to the progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight.
Grace | Insight | Revelation |
Conflicts bring experience; and experience brings that growth in grace which is not to be attained by any other means.
Experience | Grace | Growth | Means |
Love… is the only truly real and lasting experience in life. It is the opposite of fear, the essence of relationships, the core of creativity, the grace of power, an intricate part of who we are. It is the source of happiness, the energy that connects us and that lives within us… It is elusive... We are afraid that we will never have it, that if we find it, we will lose it or take it for granted, fearing it will not last.
Creativity | Energy | Experience | Fear | Grace | Life | Life | Love | Power | Will | Afraid |
Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does not good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise.
Fault | Good | Grace | Happy | Life | Life | Practice | Praise | Silence | Sin | Virtue | Virtue |
How hard it is to confess that we have spoken without thinking, that we have talked nonsense. How many a man says a thing in haste and heat, without fully understanding or half meaning it, and then, because he has said it, holds fast to it, and tries to defend it as if it were true! But how much wiser, how much more admirable and attractive it is when a man has the grace to perceive and acknowledge his mistakes! It gives us assurance that he is capable of learning, of growing, of improving, so that his future will be better than his past.
Better | Future | Grace | Haste | Learning | Man | Meaning | Nonsense | Past | Thinking | Understanding | Will |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.
Eternity | Grace | Heart | Individual | Principles | Purity | Self | Thought | World | Thought |
The end... of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection.
Faith | God | Grace | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Parents | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | God |
Few people have ever tried seriously to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.
Desire | Good | Grace | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | People |