This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
Absolute | Experience | Mercy |
If every man had a beginning, every man then was once nothing; he could not then make himself, because nothing cannot be the cause of something; “The Lord he is God; he hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. c. iii.) Whatsoever begun in time was not; and when it was nothing, it had nothing, and could do nothing; and therefore could never give to itself, nor to any other, to be—or to be able to do: for then it gave what it had not, and did what it could not. Since reason must acknowledge a first of every kind, a first man, etc., it must acknowledge him created and made, not by himself: why have not other men since risen up by themselves, not by chance? why hath not chance produced the like in that long time the world hath stood? If we never knew anything give being to itself, how can we imagine anything ever could?
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
The anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends, the anti-Semites’ nations will become our allies.
Men |
Let those be thy choicest companions who have made Christ their chief companion.
So many read good books and get nothing, because they read them over cursorily, slightly, superficially.
If Providence did beards devise, To prove the wearers of them wise, A fulsome goat would then, by nature, Excel each other human creature
The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false, and to form a correct judgment between them.
Character | Death | Good | Law | Mercy | Murder | Object | Power | Public | Security | Time | Treason | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Murder |
My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and ‘awareness.’ This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or non-accomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes.
Decision | Hell | Little | Mercy | Opinion | Power | Providence | Thought | Weakness | Will | Work | Thought |
Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.
Experience | God | Hunger | Knowledge | Nothing | Prayer | Will | God |
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!
Angels | Beginning | Enough | Heaven | Opinion | Prayer | Think |
Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign, but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident. It is the great task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of all is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society.
Absolute | Dependence | God | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Man | Need | Perfection | Prayer | God |
I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within.
Day | Desire | Good | Heart | Joy | Little | Love | Men | Mercy | Murder | People | Poverty | Praise | Solitude | Taste | Will | World | Murder |
It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this. There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed. This new language of prayer has to come out of something that transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Abstract | Enemy | Evil | God | Grace | Justify | Love | Mercy | Nature | Oneness | Reality | Respect | Right | Rights | Understanding | Respect | God |
It seems to me that policies which are content to create an ‘image’ of a benevolent and peace-loving America are valueless, because they lack the depth and the seriousness of motivation which are absolutely necessary for constructive action in a world crisis. Confronted with the difficult task of ‘assuming world leadership’ in a world from which it has remained traditionally and by preference isolated, America seems to have reacted with adolescent panic and truculence. Hostility, unpopularity and totally unsympathetic criticism have proved to be a serious test of the American political ideology.
Heart | Language | Life | Life | Love | Man | Perfection | Prayer | Time |