This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The testing of good and bad is in order that the gold may boil and bring the scum to the top.
The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence.
Intelligence | Order | Universe |
Patterns and structure. Everywhere we look we see them. What appears random and chaotic also has order. And on Earth much of the order is linked to interrelationships that drive constant change. Cycles and rhythms. Pulses and flows. Changes in magnetic fields. Continental plates moving. Water cycles. Seasons changing. Life and death. Process and connection. Nature flows through webs of structure and shifting time: from ocean to cloud to rain to river to ocean. Natural rhythms.
Change | Death | Earth | Life | Life | Nature | Order | Time |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge… Nothing becomes truly “one’s own” except on the basis of some genuine effort or sacrifice… The gift of material goods makes people dependent, but the gift of knowledge makes them free.
Leon Shenendoah, elected Tadodaho, aka Chief Leon Shenendoah
These are our times and our responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes. In order to do this we must recognize the enemy -- the one within us. We must begin with ourselves.
Duty | Earth | Enemy | Life | Life | Mother | Order | Sacred |
We will never comprehend why the infinite will, in order to realize its completion, requires the incomplete, or how evil can result in good. No forced attempt to reason out these events can give us peace of God. There is a different way, a way born from inward experience. We may not have been given the privilege of understanding how events are expressing the will of God. But one thing we do know, and on that knowledge all else depends – the will of God is directed only toward one thing: the spiritual.
Events | Evil | Experience | God | Good | Knowledge | Order | Peace | Reason | Understanding | Will | God | Privilege |
What is it but blasphemy when God is merely my means to an end? That takes its toll. If we turn God into a puppet of our desires (even when that happens by the pious route of prayer) then he shuts up his heaven and we find ourselves thrown back into the silence of our unredeemed life.
Blasphemy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Means | Pious | Prayer | Silence | God |
Kerry Thornley, fully Kerry Wendell Thornley, aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or Lord Omar
What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
Order |
Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad
Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.
If we are to be saved from our futility we must recover the faculty of being still: we must make an enclave of silence within our own souls.
Silence |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
I believe that the true welfare of man lies in the fulfillment of the Will of God; and that His will consists in men loving each other, and therefore behaving toward others as they desire that others should behave with them. I believe that the meaning of life of every man, therefore, lies only in the increase of love in himself; that this increase of love leads the individual man in this life toward greater and greater welfare; that after death it gives the greater welfare the more love there be in the man; and that, at the same time, more than anything else, it contributes to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, i.e., to an order of life where the discord, deceit, and violence which now reign will be replaced by free agreement, truth, and brotherly love between men.
Death | Deceit | Desire | Earth | Fulfillment | God | Individual | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Men | Order | Time | Truth | Will | God |
Allen Tate, fully John Orley Allen Tate
Man is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do.
Angus Wilson, fully Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson
All the seven deadly sins are self destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, avarice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape.
Anger | Appetite | Avarice | Effort | Envy | Fear | Gluttony | Lust | Power | Pride | Self | Sloth |
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.