This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Four simple questions have shaped the spiritual journeys of pilgrims and seekers for thousands of years. These questions enable us to gently awaken the four fundamental realms of inner life: Identity, Love, Daily Practice, and Kindness. (1) Who am I? We have within us an essential nature that is whole and unbroken. (2) What do I love? (3) How shall I live, knowing I will die? Every moment of life is a precious gift. (4) What is my gift to the family of the earth?
Earth | Family | Kindness | Knowing | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Practice | Will |
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
In the end, we must always return to our beliefs. From the mundane to the mystical, they inform us about reality and they shape our future lives. And if the ultimate reality remains a mystery, so much the better, for it is the questions that give us meaning, that drive us forward and fill us with transcendent awe.
Awe | Better | Future | Meaning | Mystery | Mystical | Reality |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
Eternity is another word for unity. In it, past and future are not apart; here is everywhere, and now goes on forever. The opposite of eternity is diffusion not time. Eternity does not begin when time is at its end. Time is eternity broken into space, like a ray of light refracted in the water… unity is a task, not a condition. The world lies in strife, in discord, in divergence. Unity is beyond not within reality.
Eternity | Future | Light | Past | Reality | Space | Time | Unity | World |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair “Will” Rogers
Lead your life so you wouldn’t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip!
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The future is hidden from us, but the past warns us that the world in the end belongs to the unworldly.
Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance.
Death | Enemy | Envy | Future | Life | Life | Malice | People | Troubles |
Sisters of the Immaculate Heart NULL
What the world desperately needs is bridges, individuals and groups, like Christ himself, put an end to all the distances which divide men and which hinder their access to truth, dignity, and full human development. This is another way of saying that the world needs community; it needs models of community to convince it that the diverse and warring elements in the human family can be reconciled.
Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
John Sergieff of Cronstadt, aka Saint John of Kronstadt, born John Iliytch Sergieff
Prayer is the constant feeling (the recognition) of our infirmity or spiritual poverty, the sanctification of the soul, the foretaste of future blessedness, the angelic bliss, the heavenly rain, refreshing, watering, and fertilizing the ground of the soul, the power and strength of the soul and body, the purifying and freshening of the mental air, the enlightenment of the countenance, the joy of spirit, the golden link, uniting the creature to the Creator.
Blessedness | Body | Enlightenment | Future | Joy | Poverty | Power | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Strength |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
Future | Man | Peace | Peril | Right | Soul | Ugly | World |
Page Smith, fully Charles Page Smith
The future is given shape by our faith, or condemned to drift and disaster by our indifference.
Faith | Future | Indifference |