This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
After the day’s struggle there is no freedom like unfettered thoughts, no sound like the music of silence. And though behind you lies a road of dust and heat and discouragement, and before you the challenge and uncertainty of untried paths, in this brief hour you are master of all highways, and the universe nestles in your soul.
Challenge | Day | Freedom | Music | Silence | Soul | Sound | Struggle | Uncertainty | Universe |
Baron d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich
The universe shows us nothing save an immense and unbroken chain of cause and effect.
The free man acts morally because he has a moral idea. He does not act in order that morality may come into being. A moral idea, born of intuition without compulsion, inner or outer, would be at one and the same time the highest motive and the highest driving force in man.
So long as we see the universe in the relation of use to ourselves, it remains cold, indifferent, meaningless to us; but when we see it in relation to God, sharing the life which is God, but sharing it even more imperfectly than ourselves, then the process of nature is no longer a meaningless intimidating mechanism, but pathetic and forgivable to us even as we are to ourselves.
It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent.
Thomas Edison, fully Thomas Alva Edison
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.
Character | Day | Death | Force | Man | Mind | Order | Science | Torture | War | Will |
The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Love is the subtlest force in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
The spirit of nonresistance… is the greatest force because it is the highest expression of the soul.
Most often faith is understood as belief in certain propositional, doctrinal formulations that in some essential ands static way are supposed to “contain” truth. But if faith is relational, a pledging of trust and fidelity to another, and a way of moving into the force field of life trusting in dynamic center of value and power, then the “truth” of faith takes on a different quality. Truth is lived: it is a pattern of being in relation to others and to God. In this light, doctrines and creeds come to be seen as playing a different though still crucial role. Rather than being the repositories of truth, like treasure chests to be honored and assented to, they becomes guides for the construction of contemporary ways of seeing and being.
Belief | Dynamic | Faith | Fidelity | Force | God | Life | Life | Light | Power | Trust | Truth | Value |
Faith, as imagination, grasps the ultimate conditions of our existence, unifying them into a comprehensive image in light of which we shape our responses and initiatives, our actions… Faith, then, is an active mode of knowing, of composing a felt sense or image of the condition of our lives taken as a whole. It unifies our lives’ force fields.
Existence | Faith | Force | Imagination | Knowing | Light | Sense |
As totality is implied in every part, so is the value of the universe involved in every event, in every phenomenon.
Speculating will not do. It takes the forward movement of deliberate, dynamic living to make this journey – especially the longest and most important journey of all, the journey from our heads to our hearts and from our hearts to our wills. If the journey is life, then only through living will truths gain force that are otherwise barren platitudes.
Dynamic | Force | Important | Journey | Life | Life | Platitudes | Will | Wills | Truths |
If we do discover a complete [unified] theory [of the universe], it should be in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.
Discussion | God | Mind | People | Question | Reason | Time | Universe |