This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All creatures have existed in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.) Eternally, all creatures are God in God
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
Of what avail is it to go across the sea to Christ if all the time I lose the Christ that is within me here?
Time |
Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL
I do not understand how people declare themselves to be believers in God, and at the same time think that God has handed over to a little body of man all truth, and that they are guardians of the rest of humanity.
Body | God | Humanity | Little | Man | People | Rest | Time | Truth | God | Think | Understand |
Creativity is the retention throughout life of something that belongs properly to infant experience: the ability to create the world. . . . By creative living I mean not getting killed or annihilated all the time by compliance or by reacting to the world that impinges; I mean seeing everything afresh all the time… When we are surprised at ourselves we are being creative, and we find we can trust our own unexpected originality.
Ability | Compliance | Creativity | Experience | Life | Life | Originality | Time | Trust | World |
Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
If you're not an idealist by the time you're twenty you don't have a heart, but if you are still an idealist by thirty you don't have a head.
Many people live as if life were a dress rehearsal for some later date. It isn't. In fact, no one has a guarantee that he or she will be here tomorrow. Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over. When our attention is in the present moment, we push fear from our minds.
Attention | Control | Fear | Guarantee | Life | Life | People | Present | Time | Tomorrow | Will |
One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It's not and it won't. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what's wrong with life. 'It's not fair,' we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be.
There is nothing so powerful as an old idea whose time has come again.
Historically, we have assumed that it would only be a matter of time before everything would somehow be predicted by science.
Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
I naturally believe there will be a future, but I do not waste my time imagining its radiant beauty… It seems tome that we ought to think first about the present. Even if the present is desperately dark, I do not wish to leave it. Will tomorrow be free from darkness? We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
Beauty | Darkness | Future | Present | Time | Tomorrow | Waste | Will | Think |
To love is not a passive thing. To love is active voice. When I love I do something, I function, I give. I do not love in order that I may be loved back again, but for the creative joy of loving. And every time I do so I am freed, at least a little, by the outgoing of love, from enslavement to that most intolerable of master, myself.