This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gilmary Simmons, born Eileen Catherine Simmons
To know our purpose for being here, we have to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know God who created us... Through knowing God’s love, through prayer, we come to find our best self. Each of us has a call. No two of us are alike in our potential for growth and development... Sometimes we find our meaning from our successes. Sometimes suffering is the prelude to understanding, and we realize that eventually, out of darkness, comes light... I chose to try to know God and to find a deeper meaning in life through sharing my life with others, reaching out and being more vulnerable and open to the stranger, the one in need, the depressed and the ill... The specific purpose each one of us discovers along the way, we do have a common purpose. It is to become part of the life of God; to know, love and serve Him; to come to know and love our brothers and sisters; to be energized and made whole by God’s tremendous love for us in this life and the next, a love that binds us all together.
Darkness | God | Growth | Knowing | Life | Life | Light | Love | Meaning | Need | Prayer | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Suffering | Understanding | Wisdom | God |
The true grandeur of nations is in those qualities which constitute the true greatness of the individual.
Greatness | Individual | Nations | Qualities | Wisdom |
The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death.
Body | Death | Earth | Mind | Music | Nations | Sin | Wisdom | Woe |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Democratic nations will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
A democracy can obtain truth only as the result of experience; and many nations may perish while they are awaiting the consequences of their errors.
Consequences | Democracy | Experience | Nations | Truth | Wisdom |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Forms become more necessary as the government becomes more active and powerful, and private persons become more indolent and feeble. By their nature, democratic nations stand more in need of forms than other nations, and respect them less.
Government | Nations | Nature | Need | Respect | Wisdom | Government | Respect |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
Growth fundamentally means an enlarging and expanding of one's horizons, a growth of one's boundaries. When a person descends a level of the spectrum, he has in effect re-mapped his soul to enlarge its territory. Growth is re-apportionment; re-zoning; re-mapping; an acknowledgment, and then enrichment, of ever deeper and more encompassing levels of one's own self.
Love is in the air that I breathe, like oxygen. When I lack it, I feel atrophied, asphyxiated. When I have it, I feel I am growing. And so this growth is linked to others, or to a collective other. If I realize that I do not love you, my faith diminishes, and I breathe less and less of the oxygen of life. When I feel linked to you,in communion with you, there is a current of love that passes between us, and the intensity can multiply. And the more this love grows, the more the faith becomes luminous, the more I feel linked to the collective other. I am speaking of God.
Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
All spiritual growth takes place by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and, as here, in the community. The crisis is to be regarded as a nexus of growth.
Growth | Individual | Crisis |
Personal growth is often the result not of doing something new, but of seeing the same things in a new light. We all have mental maps of our world that we mistake for the actual territory. By clinging on to old maps we fail to see the true lie of the land and get lost.
Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.