This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Belief consists not in the nature and order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind... something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.
Belief | Ideas | Imagination | Judgment | Mind | Nature | Order |
Hirohito, posthumously called Emperor Shōwa or the Shōwa Emperor NULL
Sublime is the moment when the world is at peace and the limitless deep lies bathed in the morning sun.
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul.
Ambition | Despise | Life | Life | Money | Order | Poverty | Power | Soul | Afraid |
True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.
Change begins by not trying to change. What you imagine you must do in order to change yourself is often the very force that keeps you precisely the way you are… Beneath all the layers of wanting to be different, self-dissatisfaction, pretense, charade, and denial is a self. This self is a living, dynamic force within everyone. And if you could remain still long enough here, now, in this very place, you would discover who you are. And by discovering who you are, you would be at last free to discover who you yet also might be.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Although the tongue of God is busy speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great teacher of the past having been this guiding Spirit living the life of God in human guise. In other words, their human guise consists of various coats worn by the same person, who appeared to be different in each. Shiva, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, on the other side, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad on the other; and many more, known or unknown to history, always one and the same person.
God | History | Life | Life | Man | Order | Past | Spirit | Words | God | Teacher |
Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL
The source of peace is within us; so also the source of war. And the real enemy is within us, and not outside. The source of war is not the existence of nuclear weapons or other arms. It is the minds of human beings who decide to push the button and to use those arms out of hatred, anger or greed.
J.J.A. Lecomte du Noüy, fully Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ
The world will believe in peace only when the Churches will demonstrate that it can exist.
Anarchism is [not] synonymous with chaos. Translated from the Greek, anarchism means the absence of rulers, or orders – not of rules or order. Order emanates naturally from the free cooperation of persons in a community.
Absence | Cooperation | Means | Order |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice… Life from the Center is a life of unhurried peace and power. It is simple. It is serene. It is amazing. It is radiant.
We must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.
Prayer is likely to be undervalued by all but wise people because it is silent and so secret. We are often deceived into thinking that noise is more important than silence. War sounds far more important than the noisesless growing of a crop of what, yet the silent wheat feeds millions, while war destroys them. Nobody but God knows how often prayers have changed the course of history... The highest communion is not asking God for things for ourselves, but letting Him flow down through us, out over the world - in endless benediction.
God | History | Important | Noise | People | Prayer | Silence | Thinking | War | Wise | World | God |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Weapons are tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.
Fear | Man | Necessity | Peace | Restraint | Weapons | Will |
In order to find God, whom we can only find and through the depths of our own soul, we must therefore first find ourselves.
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the older order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
Experience | Fear | Incredulity | Mankind | Nothing | Order | Success |