This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We need to get rid of some false meanings that we give to the words eternal and eternity. The psychological idea connected with eternal life cannot be limited to the view that man is changed into another state at death, merely by the act of dying. It would be far more correct to say that it refers, first of all, to some change that man is capable of undergoing now, in this life, and one that is connected with the attainment of unity. The modern term psychology means literally the science of the soul. But in former times there actually existed a science of the soul based upon the idea that man is an imperfect state but capable of reaching a further state... No totality-act is possible; the will is separate from knowledge, the feeling from intellect.
Attainment | Change | Death | Eternal | Eternity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Means | Need | Psychology | Science | Soul | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words |
C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.
Conduct | Force | Life | Life | Piety | Religion | Rhetoric | Sensibility | Spirit | Wisdom | World | Worship |
For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.
Mystery | Science | Speculation | Wisdom |
I feel that just understanding near-death experiences will be our first step at healing the great division between science and religion that started with Isaac Newton almost three hundred years ago. Educating physicians, nurses, and ourselves about what people experience in those final hours will shatter our prejudices about the ways we think about medicine and life.
Death | Experience | Life | Life | People | Religion | Science | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | Think |
Martin Opitz, fully Martin Opitz von Boberfeld
It is not the variegated colors, the cheerful sounds, and the warm breezes which enliven us so much in spring; it is the quiet prophetic spirit of endless hope, a presentiment of many happy days, the anticipation of higher everlasting blossoms and fruits, and the secret sympathy with the world that is developing itself.
Anticipation | Happy | Hope | Quiet | Spirit | Sympathy | Wisdom | World |
Pope Pius XI, born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti NULL
Those who speak of the incompatibility of science and religion either make science say that which it never said or make religion say that which it never taught.
Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |
Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.
The total achievement of science hitherto is but a recognition of a small fraction of the creative thoughts by which the world is made.
Achievement | Science | Wisdom | World |
Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life.
Art | Balance | Life | Life | Man | Mystery | Novelty | Order | Science | Struggle | Wisdom | Novelty | Art |
Novalis, pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg NULL
It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world.
Blessedness | Eternal | Happy | Hope | Nature | Prophecy | Spirit | Sympathy | Wisdom | World |