This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What education is to the individual, revelation is to the whole human race.
Education | Human race | Individual | Race | Revelation |
Inspiration presupposes revelation. Inspiration may be called the guardian of revelation.
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman
Religion is proposed not as a transcendent revelation of the nature of man and the world, but as a means of weathering the storms of life, or of deepening one’s spiritual existence, or of preserving the social order, or of warding off anxiety.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Existence | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nature | Order | Religion | Revelation | World |
The mission of art is to achieve a deeper understanding of nature’s beauty. The mission, to put it another way, is to observe nature with an artistic mind, a mind bent on discovering beauty. Therefore, the kind of nature that the average person sees does not make art when it is reproduced.
Art | Beauty | Mind | Mission | Nature | Understanding | Art |
Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
Our beliefs serve myriad purposes: They help us to organize the world in meaningful ways… They can also connect us with the transcendent dimensions of experience, and give us inspiration and hope, essential tools for confronting those moments of confusion and doubt that are so often part of life.
Doubt | Experience | Hope | Inspiration | Life | Life | World |
Before reaching us, divine revelation has passed through social contests whose coloring it tended to assume; and to catch its spirit it is often necessary to relive the past and breathe its atmosphere.
Past | Revelation | Spirit |
Most religions are absolutist. Claims to revelation militate against rational argument and compromise. In this sense all religions contain totalitarian possibilities; for totalitarianism, which welds the state into a single body “knit together as one man” is really the religious impulse, the worship of leadership and ideology, the cult of Person or Book, directed towards secular ends.
Argument | Body | Cult | Ends | Impulse | Man | Revelation | Sense | Worship | Leadership |
Roger L. Shinn, fully Roger Lincoln Shinn
The stumbling block of revelation is the belief in God in time, God in history.
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
Action | Inspiration |
Know what work you want to do and go after it. The young man who gets ahead must decide for himself what he wishes to do. From his own tastes, his own enthusiasm, how he must get the motive and the inspiration which are to start him on his way to a successful life.
Enthusiasm | Inspiration | Life | Life | Man | Wishes | Work |
Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
It is the historical function of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping stones to the progressive process of the revelation of always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight.
Grace | Insight | Revelation |
Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer
The ideal of man is to be a revelation himself, clearly to recognize himself as a manifestation of God.
God | Man | Revelation |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.
Belief | Human race | Mission | Race |
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not for the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?
Devotion | Heart | Inspiration | Life | Life | Love | Self | Work |
There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye; of music where there is an unstopped human ear; and of inspiration where there is a receptive human spirit.
Beauty | Inspiration | Music | Spirit | Beauty |
Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
When we go beyond the ego and experience the sudden revelation that absolutely nothing is lacking, then immediately the faith is there to jump. The leap itself is the revelation, the revelation is the leap.
Ego | Experience | Faith | Nothing | Revelation |
They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.
Ability | Achievement | Awareness | Confidence | Effort | Failure | Inspiration | Misfortune | Patience | Persistence | Will | Talent | Failure | Awareness |
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Cause | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mission | Purpose | Purpose | Search | Story |