This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
René Bazin, fully René François Nicolas Marie Bazin
There is no need to go searching for a remedy for the evils of the time. The remedy already exists - it is the gift of one’s self to those who have fallen so low that even hope fails them. Open wide your heart.
Grace Helen Yerbury, fully Grace Helen Davies Yerbury
If man's religion is of any importance, it is not just a garment of expression of unity with and security in the professed beliefs of a special group. It is rather an attitude of respect for himself, his God, his fellowman, which underwrites all his activity, which is allowed freedom of expression within the limitations of that respect.
Freedom | God | Man | Religion | Respect | Security | Unity | Wisdom | Respect |
Bayazid Bastami, also known as Abu-Yazid Al-Bistami or Tayfur Abu Yazid al-Bustami
Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.
Forgetfulness | God | Self |
Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo
After rain comes sunshine; after darkness comes the glorious dawn. There is no sorrow without its alloy of joy, there is no joy without its admixture of sorrow. Behind the ugly terrible mask of misfortune lies the beautiful soothing countenance of prosperity. So, tear the mask!
Darkness | Dawn | Joy | Misfortune | Prosperity | Sorrow | Ugly | Misfortune |
Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
The submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one know not why - some of us like to believe that this is what religion means.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
The temptation of Protestantism has always been to magnify freedom at the expense of unity. The temptation of Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, has been to magnify unity at the expense of freedom.
Freedom | Temptation | Unity | Temptation |
Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges
Music being the universal expression of the mysterious and supernatural, the best that man has ever attained to, is capable of uniting in common devotion minds that are only separated by creeds, and it comforts our hope with a brighter promise of unity than any logic offers.
The universe appears to us in two opposite parts, I and World. We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as soon as consciousness first dawn on us… Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we begin again to find the unity out of which we have separated ourselves… Our thinking links us to the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals.
Consciousness | Dawn | Thinking | Thought | Unity | Universe | World |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
Self |
A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.
Beauty | Compassion | Consciousness | Delusion | Ego | Experience | Feelings | Humanity | Nature | Prison | Rest | Self | Sense | Space | Thinking | Time | Universe | Value |
In this new world-conception all phenomena are related to one another. Each conditions and is in turn conditioned by the others, so that the world becomes an integrated whole – an integrated unity of interdependent parts.
Interdependent | Phenomena | Unity | World |
Technology has wiped out the frontiers that formerly separated men, countries and peoples. Man has become a citizen of the world. Thus, modern man finds himself in an environment without spiritual unity or religious homogeneity.
Man | Men | Technology | Unity | World |