This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Theologia Germanica, aka Theologia Deutsch or Teutsch NULL
God in eternity is without contradiction, suffering and grief, and nothing can hurt or vex him of all that is or befalleth. But with God, when he is made Man, it is otherwise.
Contradiction | Eternity | God | Grief | Man | Nothing | Suffering |
The older I grow - and I now stand on the brink of eternity - the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Out of eternity this new day is born; into eternity at night will return.
Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
Art | Control | Dreams | Effort | Eternal | Eternity | Events | Heart | Illusion | Imagination | Important | Intention | Life | Life | Question | Rationality | Respect | Sensibility | Soul | Surrender | Time | Respect | Art |
Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. the natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of his habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is the unity, the eternity - I had almost said the infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God.
Body | Eternity | God | Memory | Nothing | Present | Rest | Soul | Understanding | Unity | Will | God |
For what, my small philosopher! is hell? `Tis nothing but full knowledge of the truth, when truth, resisted long, is sworn our foe. And calls eternity to do her right.
Our Universe is everlasting, creating the light of eternity within its electromagnetic field, creating light in the atmospheres of planets, heat and life, in the velocity of rotation and speed in orbit about the metagalaxy, a prodigious system within the depths of intergalactic void, the limitless reaches of outer space where the minimum-temperature controls the lives of galaxies, as they orbit in continuous momentum, in ever widening circles, about the nucleus, or electromagnetic hub of the metagalaxy.
In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency …and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving — from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings are what eternity is made of -- moments when we human beings can say "I love you," "I'm proud of you," "I forgive you," "I'm grateful for you." That's what eternity is made of: invisible imperishable good stuff.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Life is a gift. Life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.
Giordano Bruno, born Filippo Bruno
The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.
The eternity of the spirit does not begin after death, but is, like God, always present.
Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
There is a striking parallelism between science and religion on this point. It is my conviction that that other world is anchored in eternity and the eternal is different from everlasting. Everlasting goes on forever with changes, but eternity is beyond time. It includes time, but is beyond time. The second thing this other world is anchored in is spirit rather than matter, the matrixes of space-time and matter it is not subject to. The third thing is that it is perfect. Those points all converge on a mathematical point, which exceeds our capacity of our left brain to put into words, so it cannot be adequately articulated. Our articulations can be, as a Zen monk would say, fingers pointing toward it at the moon.
Capacity | Eternal | Eternity | Religion | Science | Spirit | World | Zen |
Henry Adams, aka Henry Brooks Adams
A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops.