This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Elizabeth Grymeston (or Grimston)
A fair woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatory to the purse, and a hell to the soul.
Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven.
Will |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
Paradise |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
Our memories are the only paradise from which we can never be expelled.
Paradise |
As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Not only should we be unashamed of grief, confident that its expression will not permanently hurt us, but we should also possess the wisdom to talk about our loss and through that creative conversation with friends and companions begin to reconstruct the broken fragments of our lives... should not resist the sympathy and stimulation of social interaction. We should learn not to grow impatient with the slow healing process of time . . . We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love,friendship, social challange, to the new weaving of a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life.
Acceptance | Action | Challenge | Conversation | Giving | Sympathy | Time | Will | Wisdom | Loss | Friends | Learn |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in? An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above. Which of those Gods is the most important? According to an integral view, all of them, because each "higher" stage actually builds upon and includes the lower, so the lower stages are more fundamental and the higher stages are more significant, but leave out any one of them and you're in trouble. You are, that is, less than integral, less than comprehensive, less than inclusive in your understanding of God.
Capacity | Change | Divinity | Earth | Ego | God | Magic | Paradise | Power | Understanding | World | God |
Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora’s most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements.
Accident | Cause | Curiosity | Danger | Paradise | World | Danger |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
There are five people you meet in heaven. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth. People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.
God | Heaven | Life | Life | Paradise | Peace | People | Reason | Understanding | God | Think | Understand |
This world is a prison for the Faithful, but a Paradise for unbelievers.
If there be a paradise for virtues, there must be a hell for crimes.
Those who have died, entered the paradise between births, are in a condition resembling meditation without an external object. But in the fullness of time, the seeds of desire in them will spring up, and they will be born again into this world.
Desire | Meditation | Paradise | Will |
Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith
For life is the best thing we have in this existence. And if we should desire to believe in something, it should be a beacon within. This beacon being the sun, sea, and sky, our children, our work, our companions and, most simply put, the embodiment of love.
It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future… It isn't expectations that carry us forward; it's our desire to go on… It is not the life that matters, but the journey… Paradise is being able to say at that (second before our death) moment: I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived life and did what I had to do… People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.
Change | Desire | Good | Important | Life | Life | Paradise | Past | People | Present | Thinking | Will | Afraid |