This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy. Those forced to live in substandard housing are thought to be the authors of substandard lives. Those who do not finish high school or cannot afford to go to college are considered deficient or inept.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason.
Omnipotence | Reason | Suppression | Worship |
Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
Each of us who came here with wisdom must learn from this school. Heaven does not come from building beautiful churches, mosques, and temples. Man must build his church, mosque, and temple within himself. The house of God must be built within. The place of worship must be seen within. The completeness of God must be built within the self. If man can understand his story and the story of God and then build a church within himself, that is victory.
Church | God | Heaven | Man | Story | Wisdom | Worship | God | Learn | Understand |
Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
My grandchildren, this is the way things really are. We must do everything with love in our hearts. God belongs to everyone. He has given a commonwealth to all His creations, and we must not take it for ourselves. We must not take more than our share. Our hearts must melt with love, we must share everything with others, and we must give lovingly to make others peaceful. Then we will win our true beauty and the liberation of our soul. Please think about this. Prayer, the qualities of God, the actions of God, faith in God, and worship of God are your grace. If you have these, God will be yours and the wealth of the world to come will be yours. My grandchildren, realize this in your lifetime. Consider your life, search for wisdom, search for knowledge, and search for that love of God which is divine knowledge, and search for His qualities, His love, and His actions. That will be good. Amin. Ya Rabbal-‘alamin. So be it. O Ruler of the universes. May God grant you this
Beauty | Faith | God | Love | Qualities | Search | Wealth | Will | World | Worship | Beauty | God | Think |
Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
There aren't many benefactors who don't say, like Satan: All these things will I give you if you bow down and worship me.
I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides.
Art | Existence | Family | Life | Life | Miracles | Need | Receive | Worship | Art | Friends |
To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
My religion is of celebration. My religion is of delight. My religion is of dance. I don’t want you to worship any god who cannot dance; then he is no more a god. I want to teach you how to live life so intensely, so passionately, that you live it and yet you don’t cling to it, because clinging always shows a miserable mind. You cling to things only if you are not living them well.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Aum is the best symbol for those who want to worship a personal God. It is a better symbol than images, such as those of Kali, Krishna, and others; because in worshipping God as an image, the mind limits the Infinite to that form. It becomes difficult for the sadhaka ("practitioner", meditator) to think of God beyond that 'ishta', when in fact God is Spirit. While meditating on Aum, the mind expands with the omnipresence of that vibration, and the Spirit-nature of Brahman inherent therein is realized as Sat-chit-ananda — ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss.
Better | God | Mind | Omnipresence | Worship | God | Think |
If I do not clasp my hand in worship to Thee, my God, then it is better that I do not have that hand. If I see with my eye an object in which I do not see You directly or indirectly, my God, then it is better that I do not have that eye. If I hear with my ear a word which, directly or indirectly, is not Your name, my God, it is better that I am not possessed of that ear. If I utter with my mouth a single word in which is not contained an entire hymn of praise to You, my God, then let that tongue cease to be. In every flicker of my mind, it is You whose flash becomes my thought, and if there is a flash in my mind that I do not know to be Your flicker, then take my mind away from me, my God, but come and dwell directly within me.
We are all growing and changing shape, we notice certain weaknesses that need to be corrected, we don't always choose the best solutions, but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent, in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows, but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us… A man's dignity isn't measured by the people he has around him when he's at the peak of his success, but by his ability not to forget those who helped him when his need was greatest… A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth. If I have to fall, may it be from a high place… A life without a cause is a life without effect.
Ability | Cause | Dignity | Honor | Important | Life | Life | Need | Order | People | Space | Worship |
The traditional religious rituals are important; it makes us partners in the experience of others Assembly of worship and prayer. But we must never forget the experience of spiritual experience of love is the first process and not in the rules of love… Traditional religions’ practices are important. They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer, but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love, and with love, there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior, others may turn to reading books of advice from experts on relationships but this is all folly. The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters… We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation… Tragedy always brings about radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss.
Advice | Books | Change | Control | Emotions | Experience | Heart | Love | Reading | Tragedy | Worship |
Everything is worship if your mind is focused on the present moment.
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like despair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?
Desire | Despair | Devotion | Disdain | Heart | Heaven | Hope | Men | Prudence | Prudence | Worship |
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Worship |
People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realize is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has. Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely critical literature or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals.
Beginning | Chance | Control | Emotions | Good | Imagination | Insanity | Literature | Man | Nothing | People | Philosophy | Problems | Reality | Religion | Universe | Weakness | Worship | Think | Value |
Pietro Metastasio, aka Metastasio, pseudonymn for Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi
O, how full of error is the judgment of mankind. They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons. They call it fortune when they know not the cause, and thus worship their own ignorance changed into a deity.