This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Yehuda Alharizi, also Judah ben Solomon Harizi or al-Harizi
When is a prayer heard? When the soul is subdued.
There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
Contradiction | Mind | Price | Soul | Wisdom |
Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so places as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavor.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.
Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |
Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was means and made to do because he is still, in spite of it all, the child of God.
Day | Deeds | Desire | God | Life | Life | Man | Means | Soul | Thinking | Will | Wisdom | Deeds | Child |
There is the laughter which is born out of the pure joy of living, the spontaneous expression of health and energy - the secret laughter of the child. This is a gift of God. There is the warm laughter of the kindly soul which heartens the discouraged, gives health to the sick and comfort to the dying... There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter that triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Comfort | Energy | Eternal | Excellence | God | Health | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |