This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes [err].
Life without commitment is not worth living.
Commitment | Life | Life | Worth |
A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does… Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the presence of God.
Action | Deeds | Ecstasy | God | Order | Thought | Deeds | Understand |
Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |
Paradoxically, then, the best life to live will be one that is constantly struggling to become a different sort of life, a life with more virtue and less enjoyment, with more to admire and less to envy. If that best of lives were to succeed in becoming what it strives to change itself into, however, it would not longer be the best of lives. It would then be a life purely of self-sacrifice, an unenviable life suitable only for admiration. So what life should we seek, then? If what we are asking is either what kind of life to seek in order to gain a purely enviable life, or what kind of life to seek in order to achieve a purely admirable life, for those questions, the answer is fairly easy. Only a life with both elements resonates with a full portion of good. And that life, I think we have to recognize, will also be a life in which the two types of good remain in tension; a life in which the enviable and the admirable are never quite reconciled.
Admiration | Change | Enjoyment | Envy | Good | Life | Life | Order | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Think |
He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride.
Avarice | Enough | Labor | Men | Order | Position | Pride | Riches | Sensuality | Wants | Wealth |
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 |
God always interior to man, and unyielding, He, the true conscience to the false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the real absolute when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our interior wonders.
Absolute | Conscience | God | Humanity | Man | Order | Soul |
The infinite expanse of the universe, its growth through immeasurable periods of time, the boundless range of its changes, and the rational order that pervades it all, seems to demand an infinite intelligence behind its manifestations.
Growth | Intelligence | Order | Time | Universe |
Belief consists not in the nature and order of our ideas, but in the manner of their conception, and in their feeling to the mind... something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.
Belief | Ideas | Imagination | Judgment | Mind | Nature | Order |
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul.
Ambition | Despise | Life | Life | Money | Order | Poverty | Power | Soul | Afraid |
Change begins by not trying to change. What you imagine you must do in order to change yourself is often the very force that keeps you precisely the way you are… Beneath all the layers of wanting to be different, self-dissatisfaction, pretense, charade, and denial is a self. This self is a living, dynamic force within everyone. And if you could remain still long enough here, now, in this very place, you would discover who you are. And by discovering who you are, you would be at last free to discover who you yet also might be.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Although the tongue of God is busy speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great teacher of the past having been this guiding Spirit living the life of God in human guise. In other words, their human guise consists of various coats worn by the same person, who appeared to be different in each. Shiva, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, on the other side, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad on the other; and many more, known or unknown to history, always one and the same person.
God | History | Life | Life | Man | Order | Past | Spirit | Words | God | Teacher |