This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
Aspiration | Duty | Human race | Instinct | Peace | Race | Responsibility | Sacrifice | Survival | War | Weapons | Work | Aspiration | Understand |
Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.
Courage | Fortitude | God | Intelligence | Light | Patience | Power | Sacrifice | Truth | Will | God |
In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.
Ability | Authenticity | Belief | Decision | Hope | Life | Life | Men | Present | Reality | Relationship | Sacrifice | Salvation | Survival | Truth | Crisis |
But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.
Admiration | Blessings | Cost | Earth | Feelings | Gratitude | Light | Man | Nothing | Present | Pride | Receive | Sacrifice | Tragedy | Universe | World |
There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand.
Gentleness | God | Greatness | Kindness | Mercy | Peace | Prayer | Sacrifice | God |
Song of the Sinless Soul - ‘Come forth, O Vala! from the grass and from the silent dew; Rise from the dews of death, for the Eternal Man is risen!’ She rises among flowers and looks toward the eastern clearness; She walks, yea runs—her feet are wing’d—on the tops of the bending grass; Her garments rejoice in the vocal wind, and her hair glistens with dew. She answer’d thus: ‘Whose voice is this in the voice of the nourishing air, In the spirit of the morning, awaking the Soul from its grassy bed? Where dost thou dwell? for it is thee I seek, and but for thee I must have slept eternally, nor have felt the dew of thy morning. Look how the opening dawn advances with vocal harmony! Look how the beams foreshow the rising of some glorious power! The Sun is thine; he goeth forth in his majestic brightness. O thou creating voice that callest! and who shall answer thee? ‘Where dost thou flee, O Fair One! where dost thou seek thy happy place? To yonder brightness? There I haste, for sure I came from thence; Or I must have slept eternally, nor have felt the dew of morning.’ ‘Eternally thou must have slept, nor have felt the morning dew, But for yon nourishing Sun: ’tis that by which thou art arisen. The birds adore the Sun; the beasts rise up and play in his beams, And every flower and every leaf rejoices in his light. Then, O thou Fair One, sit thee down, for thou art as the grass, Thou risest in the dew of morning, and at night art folded up.’ ‘Alas! am I but as a flower? Then will I sit me down; Then will I weep; then I’ll complain, and sigh for immortality, And chide my maker, thee O Sun, that raisedst me to fall.’ So saying she sat down and wept beneath the apple-trees. ‘O! be thou blotted out, thou Sun, that raisedst me to trouble, That gavest me a heart to crave, and raisedst me, thy phantom, To feel thy heart, and see thy light, and wander here alone, Hopeless, if I am like the grass, and so shall pass away.’ ‘Rise, sluggish Soul! Why sitt’st thou here? why dost thou sit and weep? Yon Sun shall wax old and decay, but thou shalt ever flourish. The fruit shall ripen and fall down, and the flowers consume away, But thou shalt still survive. Arise! O dry thy dewy tears!’ ‘Ha! shall I still survive? Whence came that sweet and comforting voice, And whence that voice of sorrow? O Sun! thou art nothing now to me: Go on thy course rejoicing, and let us both rejoice together! I walk among His flocks and hear the bleating of His lambs. O! that I could behold His face and follow His pure feet! I walk by the footsteps of His flocks. Come hither, tender flocks! Can you converse with a pure Soul that seeketh for her Maker? You answer not: then am I set your mistress in this garden. I’ll watch you and attend your footsteps. You are not like the birds That sing and fly in the bright air; but you do lick my feet, And let me touch your woolly backs: follow me as I sing; For in my bosom a new Song arises to my Lord: ‘Rise up, O Sun! most glorious minister and light of day! Flow on, ye gentle airs, and bear the voice of my rejoicing! Wave freshly, clear waters, flowing around the tender grass; And thou, sweet-smelling ground, put forth thy life in fruit and flowers! Follow me, O my flocks, and hear me sing my rapturous song! I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds that glitter in the sun. I will call, and who shall answer me? I shall sing; who shall reply? For, from my pleasant hills, behold the living, living springs, Running among my green pastures, delighting among my trees! I am not here alone: my flocks, you are my brethren; And you birds, that sing and adorn the sky, you are my sisters. I sing, and you reply to my song; I rejoice, and you are glad. Follow me, O my flocks! we will now descend into the valley. O, how delicious are the grapes, flourishing in the sun! How clear the spring of the rock, running among the golden sand! How cool the breezes of the valley! And the arms of the branching trees Cover us from the sun: come and let us sit in the shade. My Luvah here hath plac’d me in a sweet and pleasant land, And given me fruits and pleasant waters, and warm hills and cool valleys. Here will I build myself a house, and here I’ll call on His name; Here I’ll return, when I am weary, and take my pleasant rest.’
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
It is a poor species of human being which this grim vision conjures up before our eyes: 'fragmentary and disintegrated' man, the end product of growing mechanization, specialization, and functionalization, which decompose the unity of human personality and dissolve it in the mass, an aborted form of Homo sapiens created by a largely technical civilization, a race of spiritual and moral pygmies lending itself willingly--indeed gladly, because that way lies redemption--to use as raw material for the modern collectivist and totalitarian mass state.
Consequences | Consideration | Sacrifice | Sense | Society | Will | Society |
Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no-one says exactly what he thinks.
There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
Adversity | Comfort | Disgrace | Glory | Love | Mother | Pleasure | Sacrifice | Surrender | Tenderness | Will | World |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
Belief | Deeds | God | Love | Man | Order | People | Prosperity | Sacrifice | Deeds | God | Victim |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The other facet that I am particularly interested in at this staging, is the shift from the old priest/priestess model, which is the individual who, for whatever reason, has found the pathway in, and then returns and, essentially, guides a gathering of people and spends the rest of his or her life doing that – where the individuals are not really brought into the ability to guide, they’re really the recipient of a divine image. And that’s essentially what has been played out for thousands of years. I feel what is, transpiring at this point is what this work is all based in. Which is that individuals are being brought into the ability to tap the resource individually and will be endowed, endowed individually so that when we come together it’s no longer the process of the have and have-nots. It now is a gathering of individuals who know how to find the inner center and when they come to join with others, they’re ready to share those resources in…in a wonderful sense of human camaraderie and, and enjoyment of gathering rather than the idea of taking an inspiration from an inspired one. And there is the process of the mystery training, which a lot of this work is, which is preparing you for such a possibility. So although I am using an old model (which is the teaching model) my intent is to bring you to the bridge from which you will self-discover. You will come to a unique experience of the divine mystery. And when we gather, one is awed by the range in which the mystery reveals itself – very creative and very I find…inspiring. And I believe this is the difference between the Piscean Age and the Aquarian Age that we’re embarking on. Ah…wonderful form prior to, which is One serving the Many. In the next phase the Many serve the One. Which is the Many serve the One inside.
Death | Important | Innocence | Love | Need | Order | Sacrifice |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
What a fool I am… Perhaps it is a fool's experience of life that most approximates Eden...a fool's paradise precluded to the very intelligent. Is Forest Gump's foolish life just one paradisical poem after another, each episode delivering him into Eden after Eden, physically, psychologically and spiritually? Does my anxious educated and socially conditioned thinking, occult my own manifested Edens?
Ego | Experience | Mystery | Power | Relationship | Sacrifice | Simplicity |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Philosophers never stood in need of Homer or the Pharisees to be convinced that everything is done by immutable laws; that everything is settled; that everything is the necessary effect of some previous cause.
Earth | Nothing | Order | Religion | Sacrifice | Work | Youth | Youth |