This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The very heart and root of sin is in an independent spirit. We erect the idol self; and not only wish others to worship, but worship ourselves." - Richard Cecil
"Whenever, in the course of the daily hunt, the hunter comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful or sublime - a black thundercloud with the rainbow’s glowing arch above the mountain, a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge, a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of the sunset - he pauses for an instant in the attitude of worship. He sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, because to him all days are God’s days." - Charles Alexander Eastman, first named Ohiyesa
"Great names stand not alone for great deeds; they stand also for great virtues, and, doing them worship, we elevate ourselves." - Henry Giles
"Remember that God will not be mocked; that it is the heart of the worshiper which He regards. We are never safe till we love Him with our whole heart whom we pretend to worship." - John Henshaw, fully Bishop John Prentiss Kewley Henshaw
"Self-knowledge leading to self-hatred and humility, is the condition of the love and knowledge of God. Spiritual exercises that make use of distractions have this great merit, that they increase self-knowledge. Every soul that approaches God must be aware of who and what it is. To practice a form of mental or vocal prayer that is, so to speak, above one’s moral station is to act a lie: and the consequences of such lying are wrong notions about God, idolatrous worship of private and unrealistic phantasies and (for lack of the humility of self-knowledge) spiritual pride." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"The idolatrous worship of ethical values in and for themselves defeats its own object - and defeats it not only because... there is a lack of all-around development, but also and above all because even the highest forms of moral idolatry are God-eclipsing and therefore guarantee the idolater against the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease." - William James
"The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease." - William James
"Don't be ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to think." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"If only man could be induced to laugh more they might hate less, and find more serenity here on earth. If they cannot worship together, or accept the same laws, or tolerate the wonderful diversity of thought and behavior and physique with which they have been blessed, at least they can laugh together." - Madame de Motteville, Françoise Bertaut de Motteville
"I cannot worship from abstractions of virtue; she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs." - Barthold Niebuhr, fully Barthold Georg Neibuhr
"Society is ever ready to worship success, but rarely forgives failure." - Madame Roland, Jeanne Manon Philon, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon
"The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men." -
"To feel, to feel exquisitely, is the lot of every man; it is the charm that lends a superstitious joy to fear. But to appreciate belongs to the few; to one or two alone, here and there, the blended passion and understanding that constitute in its essence worship." - Elizabeth Sara Sheppard
"By the one same act man both serves and worships God, for worship regards the excellence of God, to Whom reverence is due: while service regards the subjection of man who, by his condition, is under an obligation of showing reverence to God. To these two belong all acts ascribed to religion, because, by them all, man bears witness to the Divine excellence and to his own subjection to God, either by offering something to God, or by assuming something Divine." -
"Certain sins manifests themselves as their mirror opposites which the sinner is able to persuade himself are virtues. Thus Gluttony can manifest itself as Daintiness, Lust as Prudery, Sloth and Senseless Industry, Envy as Hero Worship." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"When one has this intelligent self-love is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is enjoined than that he shall do all in his power to commend to him the love of God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right piety, this the service due to God only." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Be more prudent for your children than perhaps you have been for yourself. When they, too, are parents they will imitate you, and each of you will have prepared happy generations who will transmit, together with your memory, the worship of your wisdom." - Edmond La Beaume Cherbonnier
"Hebrew has but one word - Avoda - for work and worship." - Hugo Bergmann
"The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
"Will and Wisdom are both mighty leaders. Our times worship Will." - Clarence Shepard Day, Jr.
"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity form the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”" - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"Men are strangely inclined to worship what they do not understand." - Henry Fielding
"True religion is not what men see and admire; it is what God sees and loves... The cheerful consecration of all the powers of the soul; the worship which rising above all outward forms, ascends to God in the sweetest, dearest communion - a worship often too deep for utterance, and than which the highest heaven knows nothing more sublime." - Richard Fuller
"We live in the midst of infinite existence; and widely as we can see, and vastly as we have discovered, we have but crossed the threshold, we have but entered the vestibule of the Creator’s temple. In this temple there is an everlasting worship of life, an anthem of many choruses, a hymn of incense that goes up forever." - Henry Giles
"No ritual is too much, provided it is subsidiary to the inner work of worship; and all ritual is too much unless it ministers to that purpose." - William Ewart Gladstone
"There is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The Indian... sees his music as indistinct from his dancing and his dancing as indistinct from his worship and his worship as indistinct from his living." - Jamake Highwater
"True worship is not a petition to God: it is a sermon to our selves." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"The aim of our worship is the purification, enlightenment, and uplifting of our inner selves." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"The end of worship amongst men is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him proceeds from our duty and is directed according to our capacity by those rules of honor that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them." - Thomas Hobbes
"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Everyone should worship God in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience, and not under constraint." - Josephus, fully Titus Flavius Josephus, aka Joseph ben Matthias or Matityahu NULL
"The problem of our purpose is a religious problem... Our purpose is derived from faith and is imposed onto reality by our own souls. But faith and religious truth themselves are not absolute. They are relative. Thus the answers one gives to questions about the purpose of life must necessarily be relative to a time, a place, a tradition... To know and worship God means, in Baha’ullah’s words, to promote the unity of the human race and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men”... Someday there will be a global society in which humanity will realize its spiritual and moral potential... The destiny of mankind, actually, is the ultimate creation of the world civilization. It is only in the service of such a cause that I find the meaning and purpose of life." - Firuz Kazemzadeh
"Religion is the individual's attitude toward God and man as expressed in faith, in worship, in life, and in service." - Charles Foster Kent
"Worship is the earthly act by which we most distinctly recognize our personal immortality; men who think that they will be extinct a few years hence do not pray. In worship we spread out our insignificant life, which yet is the work of the Creator’s hands... before the Eternal and All-Merciful, that we may learn the manners of a higher sphere, and fit ourselves for companionship with saints and angels, and for the everlasting sight of the face of God." - Henry Parry Liddon
"O, how full of error is the judgment of mankind. They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons. They call it fortune when they know not the cause, and thus worship their own ignorance changed into a deity." - Metastasio, aka Pietro Petastasio, pseudonymn for Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi NULL
"Yet it is meet and proper that a nation should set apart an annual day for national giving of thanks. It is a public recognition of God as the Author of all prosperity. It is the erection of a memorial to the honor of him who has led us through another year. The annual proclamations which call to the duty of thanksgiving are calculated to remind the people of their indebtedness to God, to stir in their minds and hearts emotions of gratitude and praise, and to call out thanks and sincere worship which otherwise might not find expression. But if the observance of the day be not marked by real remembering of mercies and by real lifting of hearts to God in thanks, what blessing can possibly come with it?" -
"As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"Every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Without a Sabbath, no worship; without worship, no religion; and without religion, no permanent freedom." - Charles Forbes Montalembert, fully Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, aka Charles le Comte de Montalembert