This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The world’s inability to achieve a unity of thought and to end spiritual divisions is the real reason society is so deeply unhappy, so poor in ideas and enthusiasm, and so lacking in shared spiritual concepts which are its own inner joy, nobility and strength." - Barrett McGurn
"The reason doctors are so dangerous is that they believe in what they are doing." - Robert S. Mendelsohn
"The roots of reason are embedded in feelings – feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion." - James E. Miller, Jr.
"A man always has two reason for the things he does – a good one and the real one." - J. P. Morgan, fully John Pierpont Morgan
"Man, a being embued with reason, cannot on that very account live altogether at random; he is obliged in some sense to live on principle, to live by rule, to profess a view of life, to have an aim, to set up a standard." - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
"The great lie about immortality destroys every kind of reason, every kind of naturalness in the instincts." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"A spiritual truth is valid only when it does not contradict universal reason, one’s inner experience, and the experience of other seers of truth." - Nikhilananda, fully Swami Nikhilananda, born Dinesh Chandra Das Gupta NULL
"The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re thee to stop the other people… Brick walls are there for reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"Love grows, lust wastes by enjoyment, and the reason is, that one springs from a union of souls, and the other from an union of sense." - William Penn
"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn one’s back on life." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"Fear is the anticipation and expectation of evil or pain, as contrasted with hope which is the anticipation of good. Awe, on the other hand, is the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the presence of mystery. Fear is “a surrender of the succors which reason offers,” awe is the acquisition of insights which the world holds in store for us. Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but, on the contrary, draws us near to it. That is why awe is compatible with both love and joy." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"The relation of existence to time is characterized by two polar elements: temporality and uninterruptedness. Existence is evanescent and always faces the prospect of annihilation, of being thrown out of the stream of time, yet it also exhibits some degree of permanence as the continuous duration in time. Without an element of constancy there could be no permanence within temporality and no knowledge of reality, since our categories of reason are “mirrors, in which the things are reflected in the light of their constancy… Things perish within time, while time itself is everlasting… The present moment is not a terminal but a signal of beginning, an act of creation." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"To surrender to mystery is fatalism; to withdraw into reason is solipsism. Man is driven to commune with that which is beyond the mystery. The ineffable in him seeks a way to that which is beyond the ineffable." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"Since everything that comes into the human minds enters through the gates of sense, man’s first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"In business, the chief focus is on profitability. Government, by contrast, has no simple bottom line but rather a vast array of interests and priorities, many of which exist in a state of tension or conflict. For that reason, decision making in government is vastly more complex." - Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin
"We will never comprehend why the infinite will, in order to realize its completion, requires the incomplete, or how evil can result in good. No forced attempt to reason out these events can give us peace of God. There is a different way, a way born from inward experience. We may not have been given the privilege of understanding how events are expressing the will of God. But one thing we do know, and on that knowledge all else depends – the will of God is directed only toward one thing: the spiritual." - Albert Schweitzer
"For what else is Nature but God and the Divine Reason that pervades the whole universe and all its parts." - Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
"Faith is not a dam which prevents the flow of the river of reason and thought; it is a levee which prevents unreason from flooding the countryside." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"It is doubtful if a truly good world, a better and a fuller life for man, can ever be established through reason alone." - Edmund Ware Sinnot
"Never try to reason the prejudice out of a person. It was not reasoned into them and cannot be reasoned out." - Stevie Smith, fully Florence Margaret Smith
"For some reason, too deep to fathom, men contend more furiously over the road to heaven, which they cannot see, than over their visible walks on earth." - Walter Parker Stacy
"Doctrines are the most fearful tyrants to which men ever are subject because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason and betray him against himself." - William Graham Sumner
"A Reason, or universal self-consciousness, transcends the awareness of oneself in potential conflict with others, because it consists of awareness of oneself and others as existing in the universal infinite Spirit. Reason sees nature as the expression of the infinite Spirit." - Garrett Thomson
"And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"True religion is the establishment by man of such a relation to the Infinite Life around him, as, while connecting his life with this Infinitude and directing his conduct, is also in agreement with his reason and with human knowledge." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"Article 1 – All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." - United Nations NULL
"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 rushing of the sea-tides of our soul; and inspirations, that we deem our own, are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing of things beyond our reason or control." - John Greenleaf Whittier
"Resistance to empiricism is also due to a purely emotional shortcoming of the mode of reasoning it promotes: It is bloodless. People need more than reason. They need the poetry of affirmation; they crave an authority greater than themselves at rites of passage and other moments of high seriousness. A majority desperately wish for the immortality the rituals seem to underwrite." -
"Have I not reason to lament what man has made of man?" - William Wordsworth
"I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you." - Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
"Replacing religious institutions that are thousands of years old and hostile to reason with a reason-based belief system would transform society in a positive way more than any mere political change or economic-policy change ever could." - David B Anthony
"The established religious institutions are bastions of ignorance in a world where knowledge has become the most valuable commodity. Well-entrenched, these institutions hold back social progress, dividing people who otherwise have no reason to oppose one another, fanning the flames of militarism and nationalism. Most of all, however, they are promoting ignorance and falsehoods at the expense of truth. How can society advance under such erroneous belief systems?" - David B Anthony
"And it’s a good reason to forgive. Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future." - Paul Boose
"The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary." - Ashleigh Brilliant
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." - Albert Einstein
"Reason provides a means of escaping from the constraints of belief-systems backed by authority and from the resentment which clever people feel at the power of their own passions. Because reason--in admittedly varying degrees--is available to everybody, it has a potential advantage over the truth you feel and the truth you are told." - Felipe Fernández-Armesto
"When we distrust passion because it is too subjective, or reject authority because it has no input of our own, we flee to reason." - Felipe Fernández-Armesto
"offers the image of a chariot in which the driver uses an obedient lead horse to control another wayward horse; that is, cool reason may know the Good but cannot control the passions without a passionate ally - without a spirit that loves the Good and greets evil with moral indignation." - James R. Flynn, aka Jim Flynn
"The realm of love, reason, and justice exists only because, and inasmuch as, man has been able to develop these powers in himself throughout the process of his evolution. In this view there is no meaning to life except the meaning man himself gives to it; man is utterly alone except inasmuch as he helps another." -
"If we do discover a complete [unified] theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we would know the mind of God." -
"Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what Is stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless." -