This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |
Men who fight about religion have no religion to fight about, since they do in the name of religion the thin which religion itself forbids. To be furious in religion is to be irreligiously religious. It were better to be of no church than to be bitter in any.
The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of the grace in the church and in the soul.
Church | Earth | Fury | Grace | Life | Life | Nature | Soul | Wisdom |
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
Authority | Church | Conscience | Critic | Will | Wisdom | Zeal |
The opening of the first grammar-school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.
The church of tomorrow must be universal. It cannot belong to a particular class, race or nation, but must transcend all such barriers so the brotherhood of man may be extended among us.
Abuse resembles a church procession; it always returns to the point from which it set out.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. to me it is the extremist thinkable form of corruption, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption conceivably possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare to talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! To abolish any state of distress whatever has been profoundly inexpedient to it: it has lived on states of distress, it has created states of distress in order to externalize itself.
Blessings | Church | Corruption | Distress | Integrity | Nothing | Order | People | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Value |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
The soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibration on one spot, until it is time to race forward again.
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
The consciousness of abiding safety in the bosom of the Church is one of the most serious obstacles to an honest confrontation with the Christian faith.
Church | Consciousness | Faith |
Bishops' Pastoral Letter "Economic Justice For All" NULL
From the patristic period to the present, the Church has affirmed that misuse of the world’s resources or appropriation of them by a minority of the world’s population betrays the gift of creation since “whatever belongs to God belongs to all.”
Prophets… lifted in ecstasy above the natural operation of their minds by the impulses of the Divine Spirit, were inspired to utterance, the Spirit making use of them as a flute-player breathes into his flute.