This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We need to get rid of some false meanings that we give to the words eternal and eternity. The psychological idea connected with eternal life cannot be limited to the view that man is changed into another state at death, merely by the act of dying. It would be far more correct to say that it refers, first of all, to some change that man is capable of undergoing now, in this life, and one that is connected with the attainment of unity. The modern term psychology means literally the science of the soul. But in former times there actually existed a science of the soul based upon the idea that man is an imperfect state but capable of reaching a further state... No totality-act is possible; the will is separate from knowledge, the feeling from intellect.
Attainment | Change | Death | Eternal | Eternity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Means | Need | Psychology | Science | Soul | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words |
For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.
God | Knowledge | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.
Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Those who give the first shock to a state are naturally the first to be overwhelmed in its ruin. The fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by the man who was the first to set it a going; he only troubles the water for another’s net.
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition.
Better | Man | Opposition | Wisdom |
We want to live our lives as wise warriors and die as men. We may not even know what it is until the moments of our deaths. Then, the questions come. Have we worked to release another soul from pain? Have we opened a way that was once closed? Have we learned from the steeps and dips? Then we can rest assured that we have lived as men and died as warriors.
Never, never do great thoughts come to a man while he is discontented or fretful. There must be quiet in the temple of his soul before the windows of it will open for him to see out of them into the infinite. Quiet is what heavenly powers move in. It is in silence that the stars move on, and it is in quiet that our souls are visited from on high.
If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past.
A truth which one has never heard causes the soul surprise at first, which touches it keenly; but when it is accustomed to it, it becomes very insensible there.
Novalis, pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg NULL
The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.
Body | Day | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System | Wisdom |