This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whoever you may be, I caution you against rashly defaming the author of this work, or cavilling in jest against him. Nay, do not silently reproach him in consequence of others' censure, nor employ your wit in foolish disapproval or false accusation. For, should Democritus Junior prove to be what he professes, even a kinsman of his elder namesake, or be ever so little of the same kidney, it is all up with you: he will become both accuser and judge of you in his petulant spleen, will dissipate you in jest, pulverize you with witticisms, and sacrifice you, I can promise you, to the God of Mirth.
Caution | God | Little | Promise | Sacrifice | Will | Wit | God |
Robert Service, fully Robert William Service
A promise made is a debt unpaid.
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Open the gate, my love, Arise and open the gate, For my soul is dismayed And sorely afraid And Hagar’s brood mocks my estate. The heart of the hand-maid’s sons Is hateful and haughty grown, And all because of the cry Of Ishmael piercing the sky, Ascending and reaching the Throne. I stumble ’twixt beast and beast, The wild ass swift to slay Has followed my flight From the courts of Night Where crushed of the boar I lay. Alas! for my thick-sealed fate, Ah woe for the days to come! It helps but to pain me That none can explain me, And I, myself, I am dumb.
Comfort | God | Heart | Prayer | Promise | Sacrifice | Soul | Trust | Waiting | God |
Samuel J. Hazo, fully Samuel John Hazo
Because poetry is the language of felt thought and utterance… of admissions and oaths as sacred as life itself, it is evident in an economy by its absence. As long as people are perceived in economic terms alone, poetry (and all the other arts, for that matter) will be regarded as ornamental or irrelevant or simply dispensable… the disregard of poetry will be as fatal to their spiritual lives as the deprivation of oxygen would be to their physical lives. Why? Because poetry tells us who we are, what our surroundings mean to us, and what waits to be discovered beneath the apparent.…It is the language of the heart…It is at the same time the language of the senses.
Death | Faith | Laughter | Life | Life | Nothing | Promise | Quiet | Time | Waiting | War | Work | Worth | Learn |
James Ridley, fully James Kenneth Ridley, wrote under pen name Sir Charles Morell
Think not, Sultan, that in the sequestered vale alone dwells virtue, and her sweet companion, with attentive eye, mild, affable benevolence! No, the first great gift we can bestow on others is a good example.
Art | Feelings | Little | Nothing | Promise | Society | Will | Society | Art |
Margaret Fuller, fully Sara Margaret Fuller, Marchese Ossoli
On the boundless plain careering By an unseen compass steering, Wildly flying, reappearing, — With untamed fire their broad eyes glowing In every step a grand pride showing, Of no servile moment knowing, — Happy as the trees and flowers, In their instinct cradled hours, Happier in fuller powers, — See the wild herd nobly ranging, Nature varying, not changing, Lawful in their lawless ranging. Wouldst have the princely spirit bowed? Whisper only, speak not loud, Mark and leave him in the crowd. Thou need'st not spies nor jailers have; The free will serve thee like the slave, Coward shrinking from the brave.
The kinds of spiritual practices we can undertake are limitless. However, ultimately the form is less important than these factors: the commitment to practice, the ability to keep returning to the intention, the attitude one brings to the uncontrollable and the ability to transfer the benefits of the practice into how we live our lives, how we relate to ourselves and others, how free we become to embody the values and ideals we embrace in our minds, how we deal with temptations of all sorts. In other words we practice to live with the wisdom and compassion, which we already possess. We practice to actualize the pure soul, which God has planted with us.
Ability | Action | Anxiety | Anxiety | Attention | Body | Change | Character | Consciousness | Consequences | Desire | Focus | Forgetfulness | Generosity | Habit | Intention | Language | Meditation | Mind | Nature | Object | Order | Pain | Power | Practice | Prayer | Promise | Reality | Sabbath | Speech | Taste | Temptation | Time | Training | Unconsciousness | Torah | Temptation |
Shoghí Effendi, fully Shoghí Effendí Rabbání
He is very sorry that such undesirable things are every now and then cropping up in … and discouraging you in your work, keeping you from devoting all your spare time in teaching the Cause, and spreading its principles. He does not wish you, however, to lose heart from such things. As the Cause grows its difficulties will increase and its problems will become more numerous. The friends, especially the older ones, should therefore try and stand unmoved by them. In fact the more their difficulties will increase the more they have to take courage and try to solve them. The Master has often said that sorrows are like furrows, the deeper they go the more productive the land becomes. If this problem. .. should be settled other problems will arise. Are the friends to become discouraged or are they to follow the footsteps of the Master and consider them more as chances to show their tenacity of belief and spirit of sacrifice?
Belief | Books | Civilization | Destiny | Future | God | Human race | Humanity | Impetuosity | Infancy | Life | Life | Love | Past | Promise | Race | Time | Vehemence | Vision | Will | Wisdom | World | Youth | Youth | God | Old |
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Trust the people -- that is the crucial lesson of history.
The proof that in the numinous we have to deal with purely a priori cognitive elements is to be reached by introspection and a critical examination of reason such as Kant instituted. We find, that is, involved in the numinous experience, beliefs and feelings qualitatively different from anything that ‘natural’ sense-perception is capable of giving us. They are themselves not perceptions at all, but peculiar interpretations and valuations, at first of perceptual data, and then—at a higher level—of posited objects and entities, which themselves no longer belong to the perceptual world, but are thought of as supplementing and transcending it… The facts of the numinous consciousness point therefore—as likewise do also the ‘pure concepts of the understanding’ of Kant and the ideas and value-judgements of ethics or aesthetics—to a hidden substantive source, from which the religious ideas and feelings are formed, which lies in the mind independently of sense-experience; a ‘pure reason’ in the profoundest sense, which because of the ‘surpassingness’ of its content, must be distinguished from both the pure theoretical and pure practical reason of Kant, as something yet higher or deeper than they.
Contrast | God | Grace | Power | God | New Testament | Old |
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The dust of many crumbled cities settles over us like a forgetful doze, but we are older than those cities. We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again. That's how a young person turns toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans toward the breast, without knowing the secret of its desire, yet turning instinctively. Humankind is being led along an evolving course, through this migration of intelligences, and though we seem to be sleeping, there is an inner wakefulness that directs the dream, and that will eventually startle us back to the truth of who we are.
Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, He can work through anyone.
Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
The Lord gave clear evidence of His supreme power in what He endured from hostile forces when He endowed human nature with an incorruptible form of generation. For through His passion He conferred dispassion, through suffering repose, and through death eternal life. By His privations in the flesh He re-established and renewed the human state, and by His own incarnation He bestowed on human nature the supra-natural grace of deification.
Church | Faith | Hell | Injustice | Injustice | Lord | Promise | Religion | Right | Sacred | World |
John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honored us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.
Enjoyment | Eternal | God | Grace | Knowledge | Life | Life | Promise | Salvation | Time | World | Worship | God |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a necessary evil, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.
Promise |