This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Here are taught three doctrines which shall be taught here as the essence of Judaism: First, there is a God, one, indivisible, eternal, spiritual, most holy and most perfect. Second, there is an immortal life and man is a son of eternity. Thirdly, love thy fellow men without distinction of creed or race as thyself." - Alfred M. Lilienthal
"It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him." - Abraham Lincoln
"This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it." - Abraham Lincoln
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? ... Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us... Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you." - Abraham Lincoln
"Who does not learn, cannot truly love God." - Yom-Tov Lipmann-Muhlhausen, fully Yom-Tov ben Solomon Lipmann-Muhlhausen
"God has scattered several degrees of pleasure and pain in all the things that environ and affect us, and blended them together in almost all our thoughts." - John Locke
"Repentance is a hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, and is a sincere resolution and endeavor, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. It does not consist in one single act of sorrow, but in doing works meet for repentance; in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ for the remainder of our lives." - John Locke
"What is false in science cannot be true in religion. Truth is one and invisible. God is bound by His own laws." - Loewe, fully Frederick Loewe, aka Fritz NULL
"By sadness you destroy the divine image in your soul. God is joy. All nature rejoices in him, and would you be sad? A true joy makes the heart fear God." - Ambroise de Lombez, Jean de La Peyrie, aka Brother Ambrose, Father Ambrose of Lombez the Enlightenment
"Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls." - James Russell Lowell
"Judaism looks upon all human beings as children of one Father; thinks of them as all created in the image of God, and insists that a man be judged not by his religion, but his action." - Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
"Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity." - Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
"Men seldom die of hard work; activity is God's medicine. The highest genius is willingness and ability to do hard work. Any other conception of genius makes it a doubtful, if not a dangerous possession." - Robert S. MacArthur
"As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being. God speaks for the most pat in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard." - Alexander Maclaren
"Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God’s hand gives the impulse and direction." - Alexander Maclaren
"To pursue joy is to lose it. The only way to get it is to follow steadily the path of duty, without thinking of joy, and then, like sheep, it comes most surely unsought and we "being in the way," the angel of God, a bright-haired Joy, is sure to meet us." - Alexander Maclaren
"If God is being and not a being, then one can no more say that God is than that being is. God (or being) is not but rather lets be. But to let be is more primordial than to be, so that, as has already been said, being ‘is’ more ‘beingful’ than any possible being which it lets be; and this justifies us in using such expressions as ‘being is’, provided we remain aware of their logically ‘stretched’ character... So it can be asserted that ‘God exists’ is strictly inaccurate and may be misleading if it makes us think of him as some being or other, yet it is more appropriate to say ‘God exists’ than ‘God does not exist’, since God’s letting-be is prior to and the condition of the existence of any particular being." - John Macqurrie
"When "I" and "You" have passed away, God alone will remain." - Sharafuddin Ahmad ibn Yahya Maneri, fully Hazrat Makhdum Shaikh Sharafuddin Yahya Maneri
"Every one is in a small way the image of God." - Manilius, fully Marcus Manilius NULL
"The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." - Jacques Maritain
"With respect to God and truth, one has not the right to choose according to his own whim any path whatsoever, he must choose the true path, in so far as it is in his power to know." - Jacques Maritain
"Often God has to shut a door in our face, so that He can subsequently open the door through which He wants us to go." - Catherine Marshall
"To most people loneliness is a doom. Yet loneliness is the very thing which god has chosen to be one of the schools of training for His very own. It is the fire that sheds the dross and reveals the gold." - Bernard M. Martin, D.D
"God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays." - John Masefield
"Waste not your strength trying to push shut doors which God is opening. Neither wear yourself out in keeping open doors which ought to be forever sealed. Some episode in your life, over which you are anxious, is closed. it is in the past. Whatever its memory, you cannot change it. But you can shut the door. Go into some silent place of thought. Test your self-respect. Ask your soul, "Have I emerged from this experience with honor, or if not, can honor be retrieved?" And if your soul answers, "Yes," close then the door to that Past; hang a garland over the portal if you will, but come away without tarrying. The east is aflame with the radiance of the morning, and before you stands many another door, held open by the hand of God." - Oscar Edward Maurer
"We receive love - from our children as well as others - not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. Love is shown in the statement of Spinoza's... that truly loving God does not involve a demand for love in return. It is the attitude referred to by the artist Joseph Bender: "To produce art requires that the artist be able to love - that is to give without thought of being rewarded."" -
"As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both." - James McCosh
"We have lose the habit of thinking quietly, of trying to know ourselves and our friends, and the world around us, and the God who is above and within us. We are looking in the wrong places for happiness. We are so exclusively occupied with material things and with their accumulation that the higher values are crowded out." - Robert J. McCracken, D.D.
"God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"For art is nature made by man to man the interpreter of God." - Owen Meredith, pseudonym for Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton
"Serve God, that He may do the like for you." - Merikare, also Merykare and Merykara NULL
"Life is this simple: We are living in a transparent world and God shines through in every moment. This is not just a fable or a nice story, it is living truth. If we remember God, abandon ourselves to God, and forget ourselves, we may see this truth: God manifests everywhere, in everything. We cannot be without God. It's impossible. It's simply impossible." - Thomas Merton
"Prepare the soul calmly to obey; such offering will be more acceptable to God than every other sacrifice." - Metastasio, aka Pietro Petastasio, pseudonymn for Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi NULL
"To God there is no time. All things are to him one constentaneous whole." - Meykandar NULL
"The soul can split the sky in two, and let the face of God shine through." - Edna St. Vincent Millay
"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?" -
"When does God create heaven and earth? In the beginning. And when is the beginning? At every moment. Dying to past and future, we are born into the creative Now. Beginner's mind is the mind of God." - Stephen Mitchell
"Often our work seems insignificant and unimportant when we compare ourselves with the immensity of time and the universe, but God gave us our moment on earth to be used in the best possible way." - J. V. Moldenhawer
"Thou art never at any time nearer to God than when under tribulation; which He permits for the purification and beautifying of thy soul." - Miguel de Molinos
"In all things except those that are simply bad, change is to be feared: change of seasons, winds, food, and humors. And no laws are held in their true honor except those to which God has given some ancient duration, so that no one knows their origin or that they were ever different." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"There are few men who dare publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"What really is? That which is eternal: that is to say, what never had birth, nor will ever have an end; to which time never brings any change. For time is a mobile thing, which appears as in a shadow, together with matter, which is ever running and flowing, without ever remaining stable or permanent... Wherefore we must conclude that God is - not at all according to any measure of time, but according to an eternity immutable and immobile, not measured by time or subject to any decline." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in the darkest hiding-place, your own heart. You yourself are a part of Him." - Christopher Morley, fully Christopher Darlington Morley
"We are here to live and love the fullness of God’s presence...God’s presence awaits us everywhere. In the sum total of daily revelations lies not simply a formula for understanding life but an invitation to immerse ourselves in it. The meaning of life is something to be experienced." - James Parks Morton
"Eternity is the divine treasure-house and hope is the window, by means of which mortals are permitted to see, as through a glass darkly, the things which God is preparing." - William Mountford
"Faith is the inspiration of nobleness, it is the strength of integrity; it is the life of love, and is everlasting growth for it; it is courage of soul, and bridges over for our crossing the gulf between worldliness and heavenly-mindfulness; and it is the sense of the unseen, without which we could not feel God nor hope for heaven." - William Mountford
"For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit." - William Mountford