This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Brahman is a shoreless ocean. Shakti is the omnipresent, interdependent action of its waves... As long as Her inscrutable Will keeps consciousness manifest through the human form, one is tempted to think that there are two realities - the formless God and these confusing mirror images called the universe. But no, my friend, there are no such twoness whatsoever. There is no super-knowledge separate from or opposed to ordinary ignorance. There is not day as a reality apart from night. There is only wholeness or completeness - beyond night or day, beyond ignorance or knowledge, yet containing both, manifesting both. How to describe this dynamic plenitude? Not with words from any scripture or philosophy. What is simply is!
Action | Consciousness | Day | Dynamic | God | Ignorance | Interdependent | Reality | Scripture | Wholeness | Will | Words | God | Think |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
One must go into solitude to attain this divine love. To get butter from milk you must let it set into curd in a secluded spot; if it is too much disturbed, milk won't turn into curd. Next, you must put aside all other duties, sit in a quiet spot, and churn the curd. Only then do you get butter.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
When you meditate, go into the solitude of a forest, or a quiet corner, and enter into the chamber of your heart. And always keep your power of discrimination awake. God alone is real, that is to say, eternal; everything else is unreal, because it will pass away. As you discriminate in this manner, let your mind give up its attachment to the fleeting objects of this world.
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say. Wow, you got tenure early; what's your secret? I said, It's pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at 10 o'clock and I'll tell you.
Office |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
The mind is like milk. If you keep the mind in the world, which is like water, then the milk and water will get mixed. That is why people keep milk in a quiet place and let it set into curd, and then churn butter from it. Likewise, through spiritual discipline practiced in solitude, churn the butter of knowledge and devotion from the milk of the mind. Then that butter can easily be kept in the water of the world. It will not get mixed with the world. The mind will float detached on the water of the world.
Devotion | Discipline | Knowledge | Mind | People | Quiet | Will |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
You see many stars at night in the sky but find them not when the sun rises; can you say that there are no stars in the heaven of the day? So, O man! as you behold not God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Thinking |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
Good |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
I like bars just after they open in the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar
Quiet |
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
Day | Life | Life | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Wants | Will |
I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment ], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice. But this undertaking is arduous, and a certain indolence insensibly leads me back to my ordinary course of life; and just as the captive, who, perchance, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that it is but a vision, dreads awakening, and conspires with the agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged; so I, of my own accord, fall back into the train of my former beliefs, and fear to arouse myself from my slumber, lest the time of laborious wakefulness that would succeed this quiet rest, in place of bringing any light of day, should prove inadequate to dispel the darkness that will arise from the difficulties that have now been raised.
Artifice | Better | Darkness | Dreams | Fear | Giving | Good | Indolence | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Means | Nothing | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Quiet | Time | Will |
René Margritte, fully René François Ghislain Magritte
This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power poetry
Day is the Child of Time, And Day must cease to be: But Night is without a sire, And cannot expire, One with Eternity.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
The next night from the Flock came Kirk Maynard Gull, wobbling across the sand, ragging his leftwing, to collapse at Jonathan's feet. Help me, he said very quietly, speaking in the way that the dying speak. I want to fly more than anything else in the world... Come along then. said Jonathan. Climb with me away from the ground, and we'll begin. You don't understand My wing. I can't move my wing. Maynard Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is. Are you saying I can fly? I say you are free.
Freedom | Law | Nothing | Understand |
She wants her silence to be final. Here, more than anyplace else, she wants her memory uncontested. She does not want me talking to others, gathering other stories, looking into the remnants of my father's past. When she is silent, she wants those things about which she refuses to speak to remain as quiet as the tomb. That is the ultimate power of stories. They take on themselves the decision about what will be remembered and what will be told. The part of the past she claims most fiercely is the part she wants forgotten.
Decision | Memory | Past | Power | Quiet | Silence | Talking | Wants | Will |
Pandurang Shastri Athavale, fully Pandurang Vaijnath Shastri Athavale
Expression of Gratitude to the Lord Almighty at these occassions daily; For gift of Memory at dawn, For the gift of Energy at meal times, and for the gift of Peace at night is called Trikal Sandhya.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Lose not a moment's chance of contemplating beauty; each of these seconds while the day changes into night is precious; in this is life. I go out into the fields and hills, in the sunshine and the air, and I become full of certain thoughts and feelings: I return towards the houses and find every one of those aspirations and ideas jarred upon.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Above the elms, all the stars in turn, shining in the night. The shadow of Venus, mighty Orion and brilliant Sirius, the bright constellations, the great and lesser dog, Orion's belt and Orion's hound; Arcturus, brilliant star in Bootes, and Capella, so bright in summer, as each in their turn they shone over the elms. They shone in my mind, they became part of my life. The beauty of the night sky is not to be written, but it was felt. Above the elms, all the stars in their turn, beneath the mild airs of summers, in the cold crisp frosts of winter, I watched them above the elms, shining in the sky. They brought to me the thought of greatness of soul. Alone with my thought beneath the stars I prayed in the night. The hours illuminated by the stars were full of beauty and of deep soul prayer.