This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
Good | Universe | Understand |
The essential and unbounded mercy of my Creator is the foundation of my hope, and a broader and surer the universe cannot give me.
The universe is a gigantic cosmic living being - and that is who I am.
Universe |
Dante, full name Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante Alighieri NULL
The whole universe is but the footprint of the divine goodness.
Universe |
What lies at the end of the process cannot be what ultimately matters. It seems clear that the point is the process itself and the adventure of trying to enrich and up-level that process despite hazards and risks. The point is the game and the playing of it. We are an adventuring universe that is attempting to raise the quality of the adventure. Sometimes succeeding. Sometimes not.
The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
Quantum theory has abolished the notion of fundamentally separated objects... It has come to see the universe as an interconnected web of physical and mental relations whose parts are only defined through their connections to the whole.
Universe |
What I mean by a religious person is one who conceives himself or herself to be the instrument of some purpose in the universe which is a high purpose, and is the motive of evolution - that is, of a continual ascent in organization and power and life, and extension of life.
Evolution | Life | Life | Organization | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Universe |
The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself.
Action | Contrast | Eternity | Existence | Future | History | Hope | Imagination | Mind | Past | Time | Universe | Will |
The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits - he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher - the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos.
Absolute | Better | Man | Method | Nature | Philosophy | Truth | Universe | Will |