This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Man’s greatest duty is to love God: that is the first commandment. The second is to love his neighbor. And it is possible for two creatures to love one another only because God exists and is their common Father – it is the divine image and likeness that is loveable in our fellow-men." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"Our American system of government by lobbyist guarantees us a form of taxation with representation that the founding father did not foresee: special interests get the representation while the broad public gets the taxation." - Alan Stuart Blinder
"The kingdom of God means that He, the Father, the Brother, the Friend, is near, in the depths of the spirit, in the core of the heart; that loves rules perceptibly in our goings and comings, our dispensing and our receiving; the whole of existence is transfigured by it, and that, while everything is transfigured into this one thing, the essential beauty and character of each blossoms forth." - Romano Guardini
"If anything in the four gospels is clear, it’s that Jesus himself was on a search. He was seeking all who are out of touch with his father." - Os Guiness
"Since we were all born of the same father of souls, why should there be any distinction between you and me or between others and ourselves?" - Wang Hui-yueh
"Fourscore and seven years ago our father brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." - Abraham Lincoln
"Supported by the authority of all institutions, parenthood has come to amount to little more than a campaign against individuality. Every father and every mother trembles lest an offspring, in act or thought, should be different from his fellows; and the smallest display of uniqueness in a child becomes the signal for the application of drastic measures aimed at stamping out that small fire of noncompliance by which personal distinctness is expressed. In an atmosphere of anxiety, in a climate of apprehension, the parental conspiracy against children is planned." - Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder
"We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion which was given to our forefathers and has been handed down to us, their children. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favors we receive, to love each other, and to be united. We never quarrel about religion." - Red Jacket, aka Sagoyewatha NULL
"What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has come to me hungry and unfed? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?" - Sitting Bull, aka Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, born Hoka Psice NULL
"Heaven is my Father, the earth my mother, and even a tiny creature such as myself finds an intimate place in their midst. In everything that moves throughout the universe, I see my own body, and in everything that governs the universe, my own soul. All men are my brethren, and all things my companions." - Zhang Zai, also Chang Tsai
"Prayer is the soul’s breathing itself into the bosom of its heavenly Father." - Thomas Watson
"We live by Faith; but Faith is not the slave of text and legend. Reason’s voice and God’s, Nature’s and Duty’s, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save justice and mercy and humility, a reasonable service of good deeds, pure living, tenderness to human needs, reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see the Master’s footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, but the calm beauty of an ordered life whose very breathing is unworded praise! A life that stands as all true lives have stood firm-rooted in the faith that God is good." - John Greenleaf Whittier
"The Child is the father of the Man." - William Wordsworth
"The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity." - Francis Maitland Balfour
"The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity." - Benjamin Franklin
"Prayer should be regarded as practice of the Presence of God... Man prays not only that God should remember Him, but also that he should remember God... Prayer is an effort of man to reach God, to commune with an invisible being, creator of all things, supreme wisdom, truth, beauty, and strength, father and redeemer of each man." - Alexis Carrel
"Education does not commence with the alphabet; it begins with a mother's look, with a father's nod of approbation, or a sign of reproof; with a sister's gentle pressure of the hand, or a brother's noble act of forbearance; with handfuls of flowers in green dells, on hills, and daisy meadows; with birds' nests admired, but not touched; with creeping ants, and almost imperceptible emmets; with humming-bees and glass beehives; with pleasant walks in shady lanes, and with thoughts directed in sweet and kindly tones and words to nature, to beauty, to acts of benevolence, to deeds of virtue, and to the source of all good to God Himself!" - Author Unknown NULL
"I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together, like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father." - Black Elk, formallly Heȟáka Sápa NULL
"Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it...Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike - brothers of one father and one mother, with only the sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all." - Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
"One father is enough to govern one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father." - George Herbert
"One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." - George Herbert
"It’s clear that most American children suffer too much mother and too little father." - Gloria Steinem
"Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father." - Gloria Steinem
"If gratitude is due from children to their earthly parent, how much more is the gratitude of the great family of men due to our Father in heaven." - Hosea Ballou
"Each of us has his gift. Let us not imagine that we are disinherited by our heavenly Father, any one of us. Let us be ourselves, as God made us, then we shall be something good and useful." - James Freeman Clarke
"Keep the home near heaven. Let it face toward the Father’s house. Not only let the day begin and end with God, with mercies acknowledged and forgiveness sought, but let it be seen and felt that God is your chiefest joy, His will in all you do the absolute and sufficient reason." - James Hamilton
"A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father, but it can be known only as love." - Joan Borysenko
"Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father’s house." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children." - Mary Howitt
"So heavenly father, what’s my reward? Reward? What reward? That’s what you were supposed to do." - Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
"It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there as many mansions of the Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly one; that civilized humanity… is mightier than any one institution." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"If you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred; nor any one else, will be your friends." - Plato NULL
"Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."" - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife." - Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and for this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they are called cause, operation and effect; or more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but we will call the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and the love of beauty. These three are equal. The poets are thus liberating gods. They are free and they make free." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced... why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards." - Robert Orben
"A child tells in the street what its father and mother say at home." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Though "the words of the wise be as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies," yet their examples are the hammer to drive them in to take the deeper hold. A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore himself whilst he whipped him, did more harm by his example than the good by his correction." - Thomas Fuller
"Though “the words of the wise be as nails fastened by the masters of the assemblies,” yet sure their examples are the hammer to drive them in to take the deeper hold. A father that whipped his son for swearing, and, swore himself whist he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction." - Thomas Fuller
"Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels." - Thomas Traherne
"War is the father of all things." - Thucydides NULL
"In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most efficient means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor without feeling the same necessities; say, rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world. " - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
" Worship is the soul searching for its counterpart. It is a thirsty land crying out for rain. It is a candle in the act of being kindled. It is a drop in quest of the ocean. It is a man listening through a tornado for a Still Small Voice. It is the voice in the night calling for help. It is a sheep lost in the wilderness, pleading for rescue by the Good Shepherd. It is the same sheep nestling in the arms of the Rescuer. It is the Prodigal Son running to his Father. It is a soul standing in awe before the mystery of the Universe. It is a poet enthralled by the beauty of a sunrise. It is a workman pausing for a moment to listen to a strain of music. It is a hungry heart seeking for love. It is Time flowing into Eternity… It is man climbing the altar stairs to God." - Dwight Bradley