This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality." -
"To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality." -
"There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs." - Blaise Pascal
"All who worship ignorance enter into blind darkness; those who delight in knowledge enter, as it were, into greater darkness." - Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
"It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness." - Chinese Proverbs
"It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light." - Coventry Patmore, fully Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
"The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of transcendent beauty." - Dionysius of Halicarnassus NULL
"Darkness and night are mothers of thought." - Dutch Proverbs
"In every step of the inquiry we are compelled to feel and acknowledge the immeasurable disproportion between the size of the object and the capacity of the human mind. We may strive to abstract the notions of time, of space, and of matter, which so closely adhere to all the perceptions of our experimental knowledge. But as soon as we presume to reason of infinite substance, of spiritual generation, as often as we deduce any positive conclusions from a negative idea, we are involved in darkness, perplexity, and inevitable contradiction." - Edward Gibbon
"With the approach of death I care less and less about religion and truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation and darkness." - Graham Greene
"Humility, like darkness, reveals the heavenly lights." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The grave itself is but a covered bridge, leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!" - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Affliction comes to us all not to make us sad, but sober, not to make us sorry, but wise; not to make us despondent, but by its darkness to refresh us, as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish, but to enrich us, as the plough enriches the field; to multiply our joy, as the seed by planting, is multiplied a thousand-fold." - Henry Ward Beecher
"No man is prosperous whose immortality is forfeited. No man is rich to whom the grave brings eternal bankruptcy. No man is happy upon whose path there rests but a momentary glimmer of light, shining out between clouds that are closing over him in darkness forever." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is a human owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Kind words toward those you daily meet, kind words and actions right, will make this life of our most sweet, turn darkness into light." - Isaac Watts
"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light." - Jeremy Bentham
"The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness an crookedness is our own. the wisdom of god created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the ye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth?" - John Milton
"Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness." - Julia Cameron
"Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light." - Kahlil Gibran
"O soul! life is a darkness which ends as in the sunburst of day. The yearning of my heart tells me there is peace in the grave. O soul! if some fool tell you the soul perishes like the body and that which dies never returns, tell him the flower perishes but the seed remains and lies before us as the secret of life everlasting." - Kahlil Gibran
"Reason is light in darkness, as anger is darkness amidst light. Be wise - let Reason, not Impulse, be your guide." - Kahlil Gibran
"Darkness may hide the trees and the flowers from the eyes but it cannot hide love from the soul." - Kahlil Gibran
"We are called upon to love in faith – to nurse our firm belief in the stars of sweet reasonableness that continue to shine behind the darkness of events which seem to us our and grim beyond our understanding." - Karl Rahner
"The function of religion is to confront the paradoxes and contradictions and the ultimate mysteries of man and the cosmos; to make sense and reason of what lies beneath the irreducible irrationalities of man’s life; to pierce the surrounding darkness with pinpoints of life, or occasionally to rip away for a startling moment the cosmic shroud." - Lewis Mumford
"Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"We are at a crossroads; I am at a crossroads; you are at a crossroads. We are in the midst of an age-old story, that of the forces of light versus the forces of darkness. Will we choose the path of fear, anger, and revenge, or will we choose the path of nonviolence and hope?" - Michael Toms
"Life is seething before your eyes; corner stands collapse, illusions evaporate, truths come tottering like bombs, elements disintegrate demanding new components, new vices destroy the walls of muteness and rise, species amalgamate, forces are set free from their hiding places, and conscience asks its possessor to take a stand; Hold on… escape… live… die… complicate yourself… renew yourself… There is no other way than to wade into the waves of darkness and to swim to the shore of light." - Naguib Mahfouz
"Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who before us passed the door of darkness through, not one returns to tell us of the road, which to discover we must travel too." - Omar Khayyám
"Once a man has fallen in love with the divine milieu, he cannot bear the darkness, tepidity, and emptiness he sees on every side in what ought to be filled with God and pulsating in him." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put into a soul knowledge that was not there before - rather as if they could but sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our argument indicates that this is a capacity which is innate in each man’s soul, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the entire soul must be turned away from this world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which we have called the Good." - Plato NULL
"He whom love touches not walks in darkness." - Plato NULL
"Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes… But our present argument indicates that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body." - Plato NULL
"Books are for the scholars’ times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must – we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In religion, as in human learning, we need a gradual introduction, beginning by the more easily learned matters and the first elements. The Creator comes to our aid so that our eyes, accustomed to darkness, may be gradually opened to the full light of truth." - Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL
"He who needs have company must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone; lose not the advantage of solitude and the society of thyself; nor be only content but delight to be alone and single with Omnipotency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy, nor the night black to him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself." -
"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace where there is hatred... let me sow love. Where there is injury... pardon. Where there is doubt... faith. Where there is despair... hope. Where there is darkness... light. Where there is sadness... joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled... as to console, to be understood... as to understand; to be loved... as to love, for it is in giving... that we receive. It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned, it is in dying... that we are born to eternal life." - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
"Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: “Do the duty which lies nearest to thee,” which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer." - Thomas Carlyle
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires - Necessity and Free Will." - Thomas Carlyle
"To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all to squalid little selves. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfill the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of subhuman emotionalism and panic animality." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"To him that waits, all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light." - Coventry Patmore, fully Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
"Having purified the great delusion, the heart’s darkness, the radiant light of the unobscured sun continuously rises." - Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
"Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the Road Which to discover we must travel too." - Edward FitzGerald, fully Edward Marlborough FitzGerald