This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
The soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibration on one spot, until it is time to race forward again.
Prophets… lifted in ecstasy above the natural operation of their minds by the impulses of the Divine Spirit, were inspired to utterance, the Spirit making use of them as a flute-player breathes into his flute.
In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel.
Beauty | Contrast | Ecstasy | Experience | Law | Love | Music | Order | Resolution | World |
The mystic vision of God, or ecstasy of felt union with Him, is, to those who attain it, an affair of ravishing emotional intensity, of vivid intellectual illumination, and on both of these counts of supreme value.
A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of thought: to surpass his needs, to do more than he understands in order to understand more than he does… Through the ecstasy of deeds he learns to be certain of the presence of God.
Action | Deeds | Ecstasy | God | Order | Thought | Deeds | Understand |
The most characteristic of all the elements of conversion crisis… is the ecstasy of happiness produced.
No person can be religious alone, however rich may be the ecstasy or despair of his isolation. Authentic religion… is rather a relationship in which one person responds reverently to another person.
Despair | Ecstasy | Isolation | Relationship | Religion |
You need not do anything. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, just wait. And you need not even wait. Just become quiet and still and solitary and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Jessamyn West, fully Mary Jessamyn West
The emotion, the ecstasy of love, we all want, but God spare us the responsibility.
Ecstasy | God | Love | Responsibility | God |
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.
There is nothing neutral about the soul. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies and desires, or we suffer from this neglect of ourselves. The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes influential its influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfulness, then there is no true power, and if there is no power, then there can be no true soulfulness.
Depression | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Neglect | Nothing | Power | Soul |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Earth | Ecstasy | History | Ignorance | Love | Magic | Work |
George Leonard, fully George Burr Leonard
What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy.
Ecstasy | Heart | Life | Life | Nothing | Power | Present | Soul | Spirit | Time | Wealth | Woman |