This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.
Admiration | Indispensable | Regard |
God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief… than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it.
Action | Contemplation | Dependence | Experience | Faith | God | Grace | Knowing | Life | Life | Meaning | Peace | Reason | Salvation | Thought | Trust | God | Contemplation | Thought |
It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this. There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed. This new language of prayer has to come out of something that transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Abstract | Enemy | Evil | God | Grace | Justify | Love | Mercy | Nature | Oneness | Reality | Respect | Right | Rights | Understanding | Respect | God |
Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need. The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God. All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this.
Abstract | Enemy | Evil | God | Grace | Justify | Law | Love | Mercy | Nature | Oneness | Principles | Reality | Respect | Right | Rights | Understanding | Respect | God | Intellect |
Hope not because you think you can be good, but because God loves us irrespective of our merits and whatever is good in us comes from his love, not from our own doing.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
This matter of salvation is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others; yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others; yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves, since it is written, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly, we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God... As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless He has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace; yet if we wait for grace to move us before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.
What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can.
This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction... The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something... O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.
Beginning | Grace | Hate | Love | Order | Salvation | Sense | Will | Wrong |
There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force that really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.
Wally Armstrong and Ken Blanchard
When we base our self-worth on our performance plus the opinion of others we will miss out on the joy of true significance.
Consecrate one whole day, and cease to listen to the groans of humanity and the discord of the world, and listen instead to that vast song that is welling up from the depths of the hearts of the redeemed; and blend the voice of thy thought with the immortal strains of Life's unending song. And then, when thou turnest again to humanity, to tell them of the true thoughts that overfill thy consciousness, they shall be indeed such thoughts as "a world's famine feed.
Compensation | Heart | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Power | Trouble |
In the fifth petition (which is, And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors) we pray, That God... would freely pardon all our sins; which we are the rather encouraged to ask, because by his grace we are enabled from the heart to forgive others.
A Song : The Sparkling Eye - The sparkling eye, the mantling cheek, The polished front, the snowy neck, How seldom we behold in one! Glossy locks, and brow serene, Venus' smiles, Diana's mien, All meet in you, and you alone. Beauty, like other powers, maintains Her empire, and by union reigns; Each single feature faintly warms: But where at once we view displayed Unblemished grace, the perfect maid Our eyes, our ears, our heart alarms. So when on earth the god of day Obliquely sheds his tempered ray, Through convex orbs the beams transmit, The beams that gently warmed before, Collected, gently warm no more, But glow with more prevailing heat.
Change | Fable | Fault | Man | Providence | Teach | Fault | Old |