This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin
There is no one Hindu view of life or meaning, but rather multiple centers of meaning, belief and practice, all legitimately called Hinduism, and all connected yet radically different… Fundamentally, life and self-identity are seen as fluid, marked by impermanence, while ultimately there is an Absolute Oneness into which all the distinctions between multiple forms of the divine, the world, and human beings dissolve
Absolute | Belief | Life | Life | Meaning | Oneness | Practice | Self | Self-identity | World |
A scientist had a bird in his hand. He saw that it had life and, wanting to find out in what part of the bird's body its life lay, he began dissecting the bird. The result was that the very life he was in search of disappeared. Those who try to understand the mysteries of the inner life intellectually will meet with similar failure. The life they are looking for will vanish in the analysis.
Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance.
Death | Enemy | Envy | Future | Life | Life | Malice | People | Troubles |
Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn
The stumbling block of revelation is the belief in God in time, God in history.
Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
Open your eyes and look for some man, or some work for the sake of men, which needs a little time, a little friendship, a little sympathy, a little sociability, a little human toil. Perhaps it is a lonely person, or an invalid - or some unfortunate inefficient, to whom you can be something. It may be an old man or it may be a child. Or some good work is in want of volunteers who will devote a free evening to it or will run on errands for it. Who can reckon up all the ways in which the priceless fund of impulse, man, is capable of exploitation! He is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore search and see if there is not some play where you may invest your humanity.
Good | Humanity | Impulse | Little | Man | Men | Play | Search | Sympathy | Time | Will | Work | Old |
John Sergieff of Cronstadt, aka Saint John of Kronstadt, born John Iliytch Sergieff
Prayer is the constant feeling (the recognition) of our infirmity or spiritual poverty, the sanctification of the soul, the foretaste of future blessedness, the angelic bliss, the heavenly rain, refreshing, watering, and fertilizing the ground of the soul, the power and strength of the soul and body, the purifying and freshening of the mental air, the enlightenment of the countenance, the joy of spirit, the golden link, uniting the creature to the Creator.
Blessedness | Body | Enlightenment | Future | Joy | Poverty | Power | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Strength |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
Future | Man | Peace | Peril | Right | Soul | Ugly | World |
Page Smith, fully Charles Page Smith
The future is given shape by our faith, or condemned to drift and disaster by our indifference.
Faith | Future | Indifference |
Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle
What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
Consciousness | Future |
Stephen Vizinczey, born István Vizinczey
Our whole civilization is based on a hypothetical future and the idiocy of fortune-telling.
Civilization | Fortune | Future |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
Do you believe in a future life? Asked Pierre… If I see, and see clearly, the ladder rising from plant to man, why should I suppose that it breaks off with me, and does not lead further and further? I feel not only that I cannot perish, since nothing in the universe is annihilated, but that I always shall exist and always have existed.
Mao Tse-tung, alternatively Zedong, Ze dong, aka Chairman Mao
Many people think it impossible for guerillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water and the latter to the fish who inhabits it.
Belief | Enemy | People | Relationship | Think |