This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Man witnesseth to a God in the operations and reflections of conscience. Their thoughts are accusing or excusing. An inward comfort attends good actions, and an inward torment follows bad ones; for there is in every man’s conscience fear of punishment and hope of reward: there is, therefore, a sense of some superior judge, which hath the power both of rewarding and punishing. If man were his supreme rule, what need he fear punishment, since no man would inflict any evil or torment on himself; nor can any man be said to reward himself, for all rewards refer to another, to whom the action is pleasing, and is a conferring some good a man had not before; if an action be done by a subject or servant, with hopes of reward, it cannot be imagined that he expects a reward from himself, but from the prince or person whom he eyes in that action, and for whose sake he doth it.
Action | Distinction | Distinguish | Evil | Good | Law | Man | Men | Practice | Praise | Principles | Rebuke | Rule | Will |
There is no succession in the knowledge of God. The variety of successions and changes in the world make not succession, or new objects, in the Divine mind; for all things are present to him from eternity in regard of his knowledge, though they are not actually present in the world in regard of their existence. He doth not know one thing now, and another anon; he sees all things at once; “Known unto God are all things from the beginning of the world”; but in their true order of succession, as they lie in the eternal council of God, to be brought forth in time. Though there be a succession and order of things as they are wrought, there is yet no succession in God in regard of his knowledge of them.
Beginning | Belief | Change | Credit | Day | Doubt | God | Judgment | Knowledge | Man | Men | Opinion | Reason | Resignation | Thought | Title | Understanding | Wills | Wisdom | World | God | Think | Thought |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Stay a child while you can be a child.
When we believe that we ought to be satisfied, rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves, imagine that He should submit His own honor to our advantage; we make ourselves more glorious than God, as though we were not made for Him, but He made for us; this is to have a very low esteem of the majesty of God.
Blessings | Change | Dependence | Desire | Discovery | Father | Giving | God | Industry | Influence | Light | Man | Means | Prayer | Promise | Receive | Wisdom | Discovery | God |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
Over a period of time it's been driven home to me that I'm not going to be the most popular writer in the world, so I'm always happy when anything in any way is accepted.
Father |
Man in the first instant of the use of reason, finds natural principles within himself; directing and choosing them, he finds a distinction between good and evil; how could this be if there were not some rule in him to try and distinguish good and evil? If there were not such a law and rule in man, he could not sin; for where there is no law there is no transgression. If man were a law to himself, and his own will his law, there could be no such thing as evil; whatsoever he willed would be good and agreeable to the law, and no action could be accounted sinful; the worst act would be as commendable as the best. Everything at man’s appointment would be good or evil. If there were no such law, how should men that are naturally inclined to evil disapprove of that which is unlovely, and approve of that good which they practice not? No man but inwardly thinks well of that which is good, while he neglects it; and thinks ill of that which is evil, while he commits it. Those that are vicious, do praise those that practice the contrary virtues. Those that are evil would seem to be good, and those that are blameworthy yet will rebuke evil in others. This is really to distinguish between good and evil; whence doth this arise, by what rule do we measure this, but by some innate principle?
Traditional explanations for stasis and abrupt appearance had paid an awful price in sacrificing the possibility of empirics for the satisfaction of harmony. Eventually we (primarily Niles) recognized that the standard theory of speciation—Ernst Mayr's allopatric or peripatric scheme—would not, in fact, yield insensibly graded fossil sequences when extrapolated into geological time, but would produce just what we see: geologically unresolvable appearance followed by stasis. For if species almost always arise in small populations isolated at the periphery of parental ranges, and in a period of time slow by the scale of our lives but effectively instantaneous in the geological world of millions, then the workings of speciation should be recorded in the fossil record as stasis and abrupt appearance. The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated.
Distinction | Events | History | Order | Principles | Time | Vision | Understand |
As when a man comes into a palace, built according to the exactest rule of art, and with an unexceptionable conveniency for the inhabitants, he would acknowledge both the being and skill of the builder; so whosoever shall observe the disposition of all the parts of the world, their connection, comeliness, the variety of seasons, the swarms of different creatures, and the mutual offices they render to one another, cannot conclude less, than it was contrived by an infinite skill, effected by infinite power, and governed by infinite wisdom. None can imagine a ship to be orderly conducted without a pilot; nor the parts of the world to perform their several functions without a wise guide; considering the members of the body cannot perform theirs, without the active presence of the soul. The atheist, then, is a fool to deny that which every creature in his constitution asserts, and thereby renders himself unable to give a satisfactory account of that constant uniformity in the motions of the creatures.
Is God a being less to be regarded than man, and more worthy of contempt than a creature? It would be strange if a benefactor should live in the same town, in the same house, with us, and we never exchange a word with him; yet this is our case, who have the works of God in our eyes, the goodness of God in our being, the mercy of God in our daily food, yet think so little of him, converse so little with him, serve everything before him, and prefer everything above him. Whence have we our mercies but from his hand? Who, besides him, maintains our breath at this moment? Would he call for our spirits this moment, they must depart from us to attend his command. There is not a moment wherein our unworthy carriage is not aggravated, because there is not a moment wherein he is not our guardian and gives us not tastes of a fresh bounty.
Argument | Children | Comfort | Distinction | Good | Justice | Men | Parents | Wickedness | Wise | Work | World |
The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.
Day | Destroy | Earth | Enough | Experience | Extreme | Global | History | Hope | Journey | Light | Looks | Means | Method | Mission | Nature | Need | Nothing | Object | Past | People | Power | Principles | Reality | Reason | Rest | Right | Space | System | Time | Understanding | Universe | Will | Wonder | World | Child | Think |
There is more of belief than reason in the world. All instructors and masters in sciences and arts require, first a belief in their disciples, and a resignation of their understanding and wills to them. And it is the wisdom of God to require that of man which his own reason makes him submit to another which is his fellow-creature. He, therefore, that quarrels with the condition of faith, must quarrel with all the world, since belief is the beginning of all knowledge; yea, and most of the knowledge in the world may rather come under the title of belief than of knowledge; for what we think we know this day we may find from others such arguments as may stagger our knowledge, and make us doubt of that we thought ourselves certain of before: nay, sometimes we change our opinions ourselves without any instructor, and see a reason to entertain an opinion quite contrary to what we had before. And if we found a general judgment of others to vote against what we think we know, it would make us give the less credit to ourselves and our own sentiments. All knowledge in the world is only a belief depending upon the testimony or arguings of others; for, indeed, it may be said of all men as in Job (viii. 9), “We are but of yesterday, and know nothing.”
Examining who am I is like beginning to go to the movies just to see how the movie is made. As we first sit down in the dark theater we find that we are relating to the objects of the melodrama, the motion on the screen. We pay attention to the story line, which we notice is like the contents of the mind, allowing it to unfold as it will without judgment or the least interference. As we focus our attention on the process, we begin to see that frames that constitute film are like separate thoughts; then we begin to recognize the process buy which the images are produced, and it breaks our enthrallment with the story line. We notice that ll the activity is just a projection on a blank screen. That all these figures dancing before us are an illusion produced by light passing through various densities on the film. We see the film is like our conditioning, a repetitious imprint of images gone by. We see that the whole melodrama is a passing show of motion and change ... We discover that all we imagined ourselves to be — all our becoming, our memory, all the contents of mind — is just old film running off. The projectionist has died. Who am I? can't be answered. We cannot know the truth. We can only be it. Constantly living life in the past tense, rummaging through consciousness to decide who and what we are, the truth is obscured. The truth cannot be discovered in the contents of the mind. Only the untruth of false identification can be uncovered. Going beyond the false, the truth is revealed.
What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence.
Anger | Discovery | Experience | Grief | Heart | Pain | Suffering | Thought | Discovery | Child | Thought |
Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
It is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
A real flame of love is a subtle thing. It burns as a will-o'-the-wisp, dancing onward to fairy lands of delight. It roars as a furnace. Too often jealousy is the quality upon which it feeds.
Man |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Distinction | Heart | Logic | Truth |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.