This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Your ‘personal’ life cannot have a lasting intrinsic meaning. It can acquire a contingent meaning, but only by being fitted into and subordinated to something which ‘lasts’ and has a meaning in itself. Is this something what we attempt to identify when we speak of ‘Life’? Can your life have a meaning as a tiny fragment of life? Does Life exist? Seek and you shall find, experience Life as reality. Has Life a ‘meaning’? Experience Life as reality and the question becomes meaningless. Seek - ? Seek by daring to take the leap into unconditional obedience. Dare this when you are challenged, for only by the light of a challenge will you be able to see the cross-roads and, in full awareness of your choice, turn your back upon your personal life - with no right ever to look back. You will find that ‘in the pattern’ you are liberated from the need to live ‘with the herd’. You will find that, thus subordinated, your life will receive from Life all its meaning, irrespective of the conditions given you for its realization. You will find that the freedom of the continual farewell, the hourly self-surrender, gives to your experience of reality the purity and clarity which signify - seal-realization. You will find that obedience requires an act of will which must continually be re-iterated, and that you will fail, if anything in your personal life is allowed to slip back into the center.
Awareness | Challenge | Choice | Daring | Experience | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Meaning | Need | Obedience | Purity | Question | Reality | Receive | Right | Self | Surrender | Will | Awareness |
The road to knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the self-knowledge we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is.
Faith | Knowledge | Light | Self | Self-knowledge |
You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
When I look at the stars and realize that the light from some of these suns takes a million years to reach my eyes, I realize how tiny and insignificant this earth is, and how microscopic and evanescent are my own little troubles. I will pass on soon; but the sea stretching for a thousand miles in all directions and the stars and spiral nebulae swarming through illimitable space above, they will continue for thousand of millions of years. I marvel that any man looking up at the stars can have an exaggerated opinion of his own importance.
Earth | Light | Little | Man | Opinion | Space | Troubles | Will |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
Do you know that if you are courteous and pleasant all day during your work that you will go home at night less fatigued than if you gave way to irritation? Pleasantry, light laughs, relieve tension. It isn't work that makes you tired, it's your mental attitude. Try it.
Fortune reveals our virtues and vices, as light reveals material objects.
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
The knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above, and some springing from beneath; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired by divine revelation.
Knowledge | Light | Man | Nature | Revelation |
Eugenio Maria de Hostos (y Bonilla)
Lend your light to the blind. Why should the wickedness of men irritate you, when it is only blindness?
Light | Men | Wickedness |
Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself and hates them for it.
Man |
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
The grave itself is but a covered bridge, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!
Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity.
Culture | Day | Gentleness | Light | Mother | Soul | Truth |