This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There’s a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint—please, please, please . . . give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son—please, please, please . . . buy a ticket.
We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions.
Divinity | Effort | Experience |
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
If we can stay awake when our lives are changing, secrets will be revealed to us--secrets about ourselves, about the nature of life, and about the eternal source of happiness and peace that is always available, always renewable, already within us.
Cynicism | Life | Life | Nothing | Religion | Search | Spirituality | Truth |
There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Destiny | Divinity | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Reason | Religion | Scripture | Will | God |
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.
Better | Depression | Dreams | Important | Integrity | Marriage | Men | Mother | Relationship | Sense | Ugly | Talent |
The six elements of her Fail Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: 'Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.
Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly.
So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally.
Care | Death | Depression | Friend | Lending | Life | Life | Loneliness | Love | Mind | Mistake | Need | Nothing | Office | Reason | Reflection | Sadness | Security | Time | Waiting | Will | Writing |
The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.
We are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire, of societies old and new, of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God's Will, united in spirit and in aim.