This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Live more closely to the rhythms of nature... To keep our priorities straight, it is helpful to live more deliberately, with enough discipline to evoke and sustain a sensitivity to the inner life. To honor the rhythms and requirements of your life, be sure that the pattern you adopt is organic and flexible, rather than arbitrary and artificial... Live each day mindfully. Spiritual life requires no strongman acts, no glittering achievements or spectacular successes, but it does require passionate fidelity to the hundred little things of mundane life.
Day | Discipline | Enough | Fidelity | Honor | Life | Life | Little | Nature | Organic | Wisdom |
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 |
Faith is deeper, richer, more personal. It is engendered by a religious tradition, in some cases and to some degree by its doctrines; but it is a quality of the person not of the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension.
Capacity | Faith | Personality | System | Tradition | Universe |
What chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are (i) willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, (ii) continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and (iii) extensive background knowledge in relevant and potentially relevant areas.
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
The aim, and test, of progress under a truly Christian dispensation on Earth would not lie in the field of mundane social life; the field would be the spiritual life of individual souls in their passage through this earthly life from birth into this world to death out of it.
Birth | Death | Earth | Individual | Life | Life | Progress | World |
The core prescription for happiness and meaning handed down through all the world’s spiritual teaching is unchanging: Remember the source with gratitude, and love one another. In this way the meaning of life as an interconnected web of love and compassion becomes manifest in even the most seemingly mundane moments.
Compassion | Gratitude | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | World | Happiness |
Nothing about his life is more strange to [man] or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes overwhelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satisfied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being something more than a mere animal, built at falling short of the high aims he sets for himself.
Aims | Complacency | Existence | Guilt | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Pride |
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
At the beginning of the spiritual journey, many of us pushed away our humanity in an attempt to embrace our divinity... we've been learning to accept rather than reject our human qualities, creating a new partnership between the mundane and transcendent parts of ourselves.
Beginning | Divinity | Humanity | Journey | Learning | Qualities |
Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell
Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
Free speech | Need | Platitudes | Speech |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
I call Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma, it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind – strangest because it enjoys in emptiness, it blossoms in nothingness. It is fulfilled in innocence, in not knowing. It does not discriminate between the mundane and the sacred. For it, all that is, is sacred.
Laura Schlesinger, fully Laura Catherine Schlessinger, aka Dr. Laura
Values are principles and ideas that bring meaning to the seemingly mundane experience of life. A meaningful life that ultimately brings happiness and pride requires you to respond to temptations as well as challenges with honor, dignity, and courage.
Experience | Ideas | Life | Life | Meaning | Pride | Principles | Happiness |
Love withers with predictability; its very essence is surprise and amazement. To make love a prisoner of the mundane is to take its passion and lose it forever.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
The entire process of withdrawing consciousness from the universe and becoming conscious of the Self is accompanied by an increasing control of all the vehicles of consciousness. Such control is made possible by the vivification and activisation of unused centres of control; and the functioning of new centres brings, in its train, a number of occult powers. These new powers are commonly known as siddhis; and they can come before the aspirant has become spiritually perfect. In fact, egoism can flourish through the acquisition of such occult powers ; and the aspirant may not only take delight in possessing them, but might actually use them for mundane purposes, from which he has not necessarily freed himself. Siddhis are, therefore, rightly regarded as obstacles in the attainment of realization.
Attainment | Consciousness | Control | Self | Universe |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
What all other men are is of the greatest importance to me. However independent I may imagine myself to be, however far removed I may appear from mundane considerations by my social status, I am enslaved to the misery of the meanest member of society. The outcast is my daily menace. Whether I am Pope, Czar, Emperor, or even Prime Minister, I am always the creature of their circumstance, the conscious product of their ignorance, want and clamoring. They are in slavery, and I, the superior one, am enslaved in consequence.
Men |
Nāgārjuna, fully Acharya Nāgārjuna NULL
There are no mundane things outside of Buddhism, and there is no Buddhism outside of mundane things.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
To bring the sublime into the mundane is the greatest challenge there is.