This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe.
Discovery | Dynamic | Ego | Justification | Life | Life | Man | Prayer | Self | Silence | Unique | Universe | Worth | Discovery |
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |
A love that has no silence has no depth. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” There are people whose love we instinctively distrust because they are always telling us about it. And perhaps it is simply because God is love, in all the glorious fullness of that word, that we have to be still if we would know him.
Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new, sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
To get at the transcendent within oneself, one must break through one’s normal self. We must impose silence on our familiar self, if the spirit of God is to become manifest in us. The divine is more deeply in us than we are ourselves.
What is it but blasphemy when God is merely my means to an end? That takes its toll. If we turn God into a puppet of our desires (even when that happens by the pious route of prayer) then he shuts up his heaven and we find ourselves thrown back into the silence of our unredeemed life.
Blasphemy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Means | Pious | Prayer | Silence | God |
Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad
Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.
If we are to be saved from our futility we must recover the faculty of being still: we must make an enclave of silence within our own souls.
Silence |
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening.