This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Self-knowledge leading to self-hatred and humility, is the condition of the love and knowledge of God. Spiritual exercises that make use of distractions have this great merit, that they increase self-knowledge. Every soul that approaches God must be aware of who and what it is. To practice a form of mental or vocal prayer that is, so to speak, above one’s moral station is to act a lie: and the consequences of such lying are wrong notions about God, idolatrous worship of private and unrealistic phantasies and (for lack of the humility of self-knowledge) spiritual pride.
Character | Consequences | God | Humility | Knowledge | Love | Lying | Merit | Practice | Prayer | Pride | Self | Self-hatred | Self-knowledge | Soul | Worship | Wrong | God |
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are certain moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Saint Jerome, aka Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymous, Hierom or Jerom NULL
Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel’s face.
Character | Misfortune | Soul |
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
Character | Charity | Eternity | Grace | Present | Soul | Time |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
We cannot presume to know what’s best for another soul. We have no way of knowing where that soul has been, what road it has traveled, what its secrets are, and what lessons it needs in order to attain spiritual awareness.
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
The soul is where you do the work, where you make the changes.
The only thing of value in a man is the soul. That is why it is the soul that is given everlasting life, either in the Land of the Sky or in the Underworld. The soul is man’s greatest power; it is the soul that makes us human, but how it does so we do not know. Our flesh and blood, our body, is nothing but an envelope about our vital power.
Body | Character | Land | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Power | Soul | Value |
It is the still voice that the soul heeds; not the deafening blasts of doom.
The beatitude into which the enlightened soul is delivered is something quite different from pleasure... Blessedness depends on non-attachment and selflessness, therefore can be enjoyed without satiety and without revulsion; is a participation in eternity, and therefore remains itself without diminution or fluctuation.
Blessedness | Character | Eternity | Pleasure | Satiety | Soul |
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God.
Character | Desire | God | Humility | Man | Nothing | Power | Silence | Soul | Wishes |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.
Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Ambition | Character | Experience | Quiet | Soul | Success | Suffering | Vision | Ambition | Trial |
Madmen... do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
Character | Ideas | Men | Mistake | Principles | Right | Wrong |