This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny." - Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
"If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past." - Maurice Nicoll
"Visible creation in time, or nature... does not exist of itself. It is not the cause of itself, but is an ever-changing copy of something which lies behind appearances. The recipient, or mother, is three-dimensional space, which must be empty of all properties in order to receive the impress of the model. The copy is in time. The model (idea) is outside our space and time." - Maurice Nicoll
"We find the attribute of unchangingness always associated with the highest level of conscious experience. The experiences of truth are always similar. There is the changing mind, following time and change; and the unchanging mind behind it. There is the order of natural reasoning that goes with changing phenomena, and another above... The source of all truth lies in ‘unchangeable truth’ which is above the level of reason, and it is the internal perception of this unchangeable truth that endows man with the highest grade of being." - Maurice Nicoll
"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." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it." - Heinz Pagels
"The common course of things is in favor of happiness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want." - Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley
"What is in time is of a lower order than time itself: time is folded around what is in time exactly as - we read - it is folded about what is in place and in number." - Plotinus NULL
"Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you." - Alexander Pope
"Order is heaven’s first law." - Alexander Pope
"If parapsychology deals with all the personality manifestations that are beyond explanation by physics, then by definition it should claim the entire spiritual order of reality." - J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
"There is something operative in man that transcends the law of matter and, therefore, by definition, a nonphysical or spiritual law is made manifest... This new world of the mind, represented and perhaps only suggested by the psi operations already identified, may very well, through further exploration, expand into an order of significance for a spiritual universe beyond the dreams of religion’s own prophets and mystics." - J. B. Rhine, fully Joseph Banks Rhine
"Commerce tends to wear off prejudices which maintain destruction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them by one of the strongest of all ties - the desire of supplying their mutual wants. It disposes them to peace by establishing in every state an order of citizens bound by their interest to be the guardians of public tranquillity." -
"In the "social order: one is the worker, and nine are idlers." - V. V. Rozanov, fully Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov or Vasilii Rosanov
"The training of children is a profession where we must know to lose time in order to gain it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to lose time in order to gain it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. To form citizens is not the work of a day; and in order to have men it is necessary to educate them when they are children." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Each truth sparkles with a light of its own, yet it always reflects some light upon another; a truth, while lighting another, springs from one, in order to penetrate another. The first truth is an abundant sense, from which all others are colored, and each particular truth, in its turn, resembles a great river that divides into an infinite number of rivulets." - Johann Jakob Scheuchzer
"By the spirit of the age... the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority... Truth taken over by skepticism which has become believing... is not capable of uniting itself with him to the very marrow of his being." - Albert Schweitzer
"No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures, and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit." -
"The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony." - V. S. Seturaman
"The chief aid to memory is order." - Simonides, aka Simonedes of Ceos NULL
"Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything." - Sydney Smith
"In order to remain self-sufficient and calm during chaos, one must have a holistic perspective--a master plan with which help you cope. Those who are flexible and have prepared themselves will find that the accelerated changes to come will provide a profound opening of consciousness to minimize the stresses and discomforts of the journey." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe
"Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things." - Robert Southey
"Ultimately, our purpose is to be so alive, compassionate and creative in our own lives that the whole universe quivers with excitement and enthusiasm and brings forth a new spirit, a new possibility, in our midst. Our purpose is to be both the womb and the midwife for the birthing into our world of a holy spirit filled with new potentials for life and creativity. We exist in order to quicken the creativity and spirit of our world so that new worlds, new wonders, new blessings may emerge... To truly appreciate the meaning of life, we must be prepared to let the meanings we have known stand in the presence of new insights and be transformed. We have no final answers, only the questions that lead to further discoveries, creativity and emergence. We are here that life may discover, know and express itself more abundantly for the blessing and fulfillment of all creation - past, present and potential." - David Spangler
"If this is correct, all that is contained in a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave. When the lower level streams of experience which correspond to the basic items postulated in physics enter into appropriately complex relations with each other they form aggregates (and aggregates of aggregates) which are what living things are in themselves, and which underpin the emergence of the streams of consciousness of animals and men. Within such streams of consciousness, more particularly the human, a not self aspect, which is primarily the physical world as it is for us, confronts a self aspect, and serves as its representation of the system of interweaving streams of experience n the midst of which it exists and with which it must interact appropriately in order to survive, communicate with other similar selves, and realize its personal essence as fully as it can." - Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge
"In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?" - Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
"Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly conscious one, which alone insures vitality and durability." - Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky, or Fyodorovich
"The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love." -
"Every creation is subject to recurrence. Every thing you meet had a previous existence: whatever you have lost will come again. Every thing comes a second time: all things return to a settled position when they have gone away, all things begin when they have ceased to be. They are brought to an end in order that they may come into being: nothing is lost except that it may be recovered. All this revolving order of things, therefore, is evidence of the resurrection of the dead. God ordained it in works before He commanded it in writing, He proclaimed it by strength before he proclaimed it in words. He first sent you nature as teacher, intending to send you prophecy also, in order that having learnt from nature, you may the more easily believe prophecy." - Tertullian, fully Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian NULL
"Every enthusiast contains a false enthusiast, every lover a false lover, every man of genius a false man of genius, and, as a rule, every fault its counterfeit: this is necessary in order to assure the continuity of one's personality, not only in the eyes of others but in one's own - in order to understand oneself, count upon oneself, think of oneself; in order, in short, to be oneself." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"All societies create their own worlds, using language and folklore to impose an arbitrary order on the complexity of the cosmos. This ordering of reality helps make sense of things by interpreting information in ways which are compatible with what is already known." - Lyall Watson
"Life survives in the chaos of the cosmos by picking order out of the winds... Nothing happens in isolation. We breathe and bleed, we laugh and cry, we crash and die in time with cosmic cues." - Lyall Watson
"Most important, novelty and creativity are unrecognizable unless they emerge from order." - Ross A. Webber
"Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced" in order to be known." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born upright. The beauty of the American free press is that the slants and the twists and the distortions come from so many directions, and the special interests are so numerous, the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck in order to find out what the score is." - E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
"The meaning of life is wrapped up in what will remain after we depart. The meaning of life is to help create a better future... The meaning of life is to be mindful of the past - to always remember - in order to make certain that history’s atrocities are not repeated again and that justice will win." - Simon Wiesenthal
"To transcend mind in Spirit is not to lose mind or destroy mind but merely to include mind in the higher-order wholeness of the super-conscient." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"Only mushrooms can grow in the shadow of mighty trees, but shrubs need light in order to grow. If you recognize your father is a tree, you should move away and out of his shadow." - Carl Zimmerer
"Even on the path to God, All is God. You are freed from your own desires only when God frees you. This is not effected by your own exertion, but by the grace of God... Then you entirely recognize that you do not have the right to say “I” or “mine.” At this stage you behold your helplessness; desires fall away from you and you become free and calm. You desire what God desires; your own desires are gone, you are emancipated from your wants, and I have gained peace and joy in both worlds. First, action is necessary, then knowledge, in order that you may know that you know nothing and are no one. This is not easy to know. It is a thing that cannot be rightly learned by instruction, nor sewed on with needle nor tied on with thread. It is the gift of God." -
"In its purest form music is not a representational but rather a nonobjective, nonverbal world, it is a world of its own, almost a creatio ex hihilo, an occasion for immediacy of experience, a nonreducible mode of beauty, of contrast and resolution, of order and ecstasy flowing through and beyond the order. Order, and ecstasy rooted in order: that sounds like the relation between law and love, law and gospel." - James Luther Adams
"At last religion has come to reckon with the fact that its highest quest is not for a supernatural order but just for natural goodness in the largest and fullest measure." - Edward Scribner Ames
"The eternal truth is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of things - life in God." - Henri Frédéric Amiel