This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Live truly, and thy life shall be a great and noble creed." - Horatius Bonar
"Whatever may be true of men’s creed, nothing is clearer than the fact that the personality and the sovereignty of God are not a large factor in the practical life and thought of our age." - Charles W. Garman
"There is a vigilance and judgment about trifles which men only get by living in a creed; and those are the trifles of detail, on which the success of execution depends." - Marina Horner
"If I were asked to sum up in a single phrase the main purpose of individual life I would express it as the enlargement of personality. Unless an individual can transcend the limits of class, sex, race, age and creed, his personality remains of necessity to that extent incomplete." - Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence, born Frederick Lawrence
"Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
"The creed of the true saint is to make the best of life, and make the most of it." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"It is not easy to be free men, for to be free you must afford freedom to your neighbor, regardless of race, color, creed or national origin, and that sometimes, for some, is very difficult." - Helen Gahagan Douglas
"As soon as any one belongs to a narrow creed in science, every unprejudiced and true perception is gone." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; -'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the people's injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The choice today is not between violence and non-violence. It is either non-violence or non-existence...Segregation is the offspring of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"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
"True religion is the life we live, not the creed we profess, and some day will be recognized by quality and quantity, and not by brand." - John F. Wright
"We need to find out, not a formula, but a temper - not a creed, but a Faith - which is common to all, and which underlies all, and supports all, and inspires all." - T. H. Bindley, fully Thomas Herbert Bindley
"Each mystic brings back confirmation of his own creed… The mystic brings his theological beliefs to the mystical experience; he does not derive them from it." - George Alonzo Coe
"Religion declined not because it was refuted but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods." - William James
"As nearly as I can see, all the new isms – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy – outdo even Capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can all keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery." - Aldo Leopold
"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"There is an inevitable tension between mysticism and religious orthodoxy… For the mystic, whatever his professed creed, final authority lies in his own experience." - Sidney Spencer
"Religion is an explanation (Creed) of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live (Code and Community–structure) accordingly, which is based on the notion of the Transcendent (Cult). Because Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life it provides a code of behavior in the fullest possible sense, including all the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of human life, and is hence a “Way of Life” – for humans." - Leonard Swindler
"The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God." - Andrew Dickson White
"True religion is the life we live, not the creed we profess." - John F. Wright
"Not by the Creed but by the Deed." - Alfred Adler
"Tolerance is bigger than race, greater than creed, mightier than color. It is not a breaking down of all barriers between ourselves and the other fellow; it is the realization, that, in reality, there are no barriers to break down." - Author Unknown NULL
"Social cohesion demands a creed, or a code of behavior, or a prevailing sentiment, or best, some combination of all three; without something of the kind, a community disintegrates, and becomes subject to a tyrant or a foreign conqueror." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Yoga is not a philosophy though its practice will lead the way to a life that is philosophical. It is not a religion and it is not confined to any particular creed or dogma. There is no "instant Nirvana"...or instant ANYthing. One works hard for what one gets out of Yogic studies." - Blanche DeVries Bernard
"In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed, than for those who deny the whole of it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed." - Charles Caleb Colton
"A creed is an ossified metaphor." - Elbert Green Hubbard
"The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race and that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumption on which he habitually acts." - George Bernard Shaw
"A man’s real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it is that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility, or the Great Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness... Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends." - John Stuart Mill
"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." - Matthew Arnold
"Humanity will one day find that it is not a diversity of creeds but the very same creed which is everywhere proposed. There can not be but one wisdom. Humans must therefore all agree that there is but one most imple wisdom whose power is infinite. And everyone in explaining the intensity of this beauty must discover that it is a supreme and terrible beauty." - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
"Learn to see God in all persons, of whatever race or creed. You will know what divine love is when you begin to feel your oneness with every human being, not before. In mutual service we forget the little self and glimpse the one measureless self, the spirit that unifies all men." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"A man's action is only a picture book of his creed." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Go put your creed into your deed." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"Charity knows no race or creed." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"The safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality, as surely as its sends physical disease after physical trespasses." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Whatever creed be taught or land be trod, man’s conscience is the oracle of God." - George N Gordon
"Anarchism is a creed inspired and ridden by paradox, and thus, while its advocates theoretically reject tradition, they are nevertheless very much concerned with the ancestry of their doctrine. This concern springs from the belief that anarchism is a manifestation of natural human urges, and that it is the tendency to create authoritarian institutions which is the transient aberration. If one accepts this view, then anarchism cannot merely be a phenomenon of the present; the aspect of it we perceive in history is merely one metamorphosis of an element constant in society." - George Woodcock
"Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller