This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The infinite expanse of the universe, its growth through immeasurable periods of time, the boundless range of its changes, and the rational order that pervades it all, seems to demand an infinite intelligence behind its manifestations." - David Starr Jordan
"Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness." - John Koster
"I believe the purpose of life is happiness. In today’s world being happy is inseparable from being responsible. We need to temper the extremes of our personal nature so that we can realize oneness with the universe. We must keep our destructive qualities from outweighing our constructive qualities." - Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL
"Everything in the universe is created from something, which in turn is created from nothing." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"To eliminate the vexation of the mind, it doesn’t help to do something; this only reinforces the mind’s mechanics. Dissolving the mind is instead a matter of not-doing: simply avoid becoming attached to what you see and think. Relinquish the notion that you are separated from the all-knowing mind of the universe. then you can recover the original pure insight and see through all illusions. Knowing nothing, you will be aware of everything. Remember: because clarity and enlightenment are within your own nature, they are regained without moving an inch." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"In the field of modern cosmology, the first principle is called “the Cosmological Principle.” It says that the universe has no center, that it has the same properties throughout. Every place in the universe has, in this sense, equal rights. How can the human race, which has evolved in a universe of such fundamental equality, fail to strive for a society without violence and terror? How can we fail to build a world in which the rights due to every human being from birth are respected?" - Fang Lizhe
"Having given up God so as to be self-sufficient, man has lost track of his soul. He looks in vain for himself; he turns the universe upside down trying to find himself, he finds masks, and behind the masks, death." - Jacques Maritain
"Chance cannot possibly be the origin of things. For it presupposes an encounter of causal series... Chance, that is to say, necessarily implies preordination. to hold that the universe can be explained by a primordial chance is self-contradictory." - Jacques Maritain
"Love is the creative power of the universe that manifests as strength and beauty. To love is to know God and the inmost nature of the ultimate Reality… Love is letting go of fear and worry… Love consecrates life… By letting go of separateness we see love as the reflection of our own self and harmony in the inconsistencies and imperfections of the existence and explore joy in the midst of the pains and problems of life." - Bibhuti Mazumder
"The body is mortal but the changeless Spirit within is immortal. It pervades the universe and is indestructible. No one has the power to change the changeless." - Bibhuti Mazumder
"Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe." - Thomas Merton
"Meaning is at the core of the creative process and of storytelling… When it is our own life story we are telling or a story from our lives, we become aware that we are not the victims of random and chaotic circumstances, that we, too, despite our grief or feelings of insignificance, are living meaningfully in a meaningful universe." - Deena Metzger
"In all ages, literature aims at the interpretation of the universe and a deep perception of humanity by means of language." - Yukio Mishima
"What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time; we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one." - Thomas Nagel
"The road from discrete scientific observations to large-scale explanations of the origin and destiny of the universe always passes through political, social, religious, and cultural precincts." - Mark Noll, fully Mark A. Noll
"Why didn’t God create the universe without sin? There is only one answer: He could have done so, and man would have been but a pawn upon the chessboard. Pawns are not responsible for moves of the great Player. We must be free to be persons, and being free, we are charged with making decisions." - Garfield Bromley Oxnam
"Today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created – despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a religious belief that matter must be eternal… Since scientists prefer to operate in the belief that the universe must be meaningless – that reality consists of nothing more than the sum of the world’s tangible constituents – they cannot confront the idea of creation easily, or take it lightly." - Arno Allan Penzias
"There is basically one problem in life: congestion. There is basically one solution: circulation. Systemic giving is, therefore, a powerful practice that blesses every phase of our lives, as it keeps us attuned to the wealth of the universe." - Catherine Ponder
"Profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other." - Neil Postman
"Religion is man’s sense of the disposition of the universe to himself." - James Bisset Pratt
"All men cannot be poets or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work the progress of creation. Whoever improves their own nature improves the universe of which they are a part." - Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
"We may explore the universe and find ourselves, or we may explore ourselves and find the universe. It matters not which of these paths we choose." - Diana Robertson
"The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people… It’s more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe." - Rolling Thunder, born Louis Belmont Newell NULL
"The idea of creation expresses the conviction that neither blind chance nor an impersonal mechanical order is behind the existence of the universe. Behind the orderly processes of nature stands the primordial act of God’s concern. There are processes because there was an event of creation." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"So far as we live and strive at all, our lives are various, are needed for the whole, and are unique. No one of our lives can be substituted for another; no one of us finite beings can take another’s place. And all of this is true just because the Universe is one significant whole." - Josiah Royce
"The Taoist solution was to get oneself in harmony with the Way or Tao of the universe, to learn to move through the world with flexibility and fluidity according to the nature of things, rather than fighting it, ourselves, or other people." - Joseph Runzo and Nancy M. Martin
"The universe is one of God’s thoughts." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
"Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"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
"As for the necessity of coining new names for God, it is incomprehensible that philosophy and civilization can be enriched by ceasing to think of God as Life, Truth, Beauty, and Love, and beginning to think of Him as a blind and whirling space-time configuration dancing dizzily in an Einstein universe, plunging forward along a path of which He is ignorant, toward a goal of which He knows nothing whatever." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"Faith is deeper, richer, more personal. It is engendered by a religious tradition, in some cases and to some degree by its doctrines; but it is a quality of the person not of the system. It is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"Faith, then, is a quality of human living. At its best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service; a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may happen to oneself at the level of immediate event. Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive; and face others with cheerful charity." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"A child has not yet been hypnotized by the world idea of limitation and lives naturally in harmony with its source. That is why most grown people love to be with children. They radiate the natural harmony of the Universe and that is the natural environment of man." - Baird T. Spalding
"Evolution progresses toward greater cooperation by discovering ways to build cooperative organization out of components that are self-interested… Evolution’s ultimate goal is an intelligence-filled, life-filled, cooperative universe." - John Stewart
"The Nine Mistakes [about ways to think about the meaning of life]: (1) Only the infinite has meaning; the finite can only have meaning insofar as it participates in the infinite. (2) The meaning of life consists in some goal or purpose. (3) The meaning of life is happiness. (4) The meaning of life must be invented. (5) Life cannot have a meaning if the universe is entirely composed of matter, as science teaches us. (6) The sole or primary purpose of evaluations is to guide our choice of actions, and value judgments are reducible to reasons for action. (7) The meaning of a person’s life cannot extend to things beyond the boundaries of his or her mode of living. (8) A person’s life does not having meaning because only linguistic items can be meaningful. (9) The meaning of our lives consists in our living in accordance with a self-determined life-plan." - Garrett Thomson
"Do you believe in a future life? Asked Pierre… If I see, and see clearly, the ladder rising from plant to man, why should I suppose that it breaks off with me, and does not lead further and further? I feel not only that I cannot perish, since nothing in the universe is annihilated, but that I always shall exist and always have existed." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"There is no separation between your soul and the soul of the universe. In the deepest sense you are the great universal soul. Man is God incarnate." - Ralph Waldo Trine
"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
"In everything that moves through the universe, I see my own body, and in everything that governs the universe, my own soul." - Zhang Zai, also Chang Tsai
"In the heart of all things, of whatever there is in the universe, dwells the Lord. He alone is the reality." - Isavasya Upanishad
"We of the modern West are the only people in the whole history of the world who have refused to find an explanation of the universe in a divine mind and will." - Gerald Vann