This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Holiness is religious principle put into motion. It is the love of God sent forth into circulation, on the feet, and with the hands of love to men. It is faith gone to work. It is charity coined into actions, and devotion breathing benediction on human suffering, while it goes up in intercession to the Father of all piety.
Charity | Devotion | Faith | Father | God | Love | Men | Piety | Suffering | Wisdom | Work | God |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self.
D. Z. Phillips, fully Dewi Zephaniah Phillips
The prayer is an attempt at influencing the divine will. In short, one is back in the realm of superstition. It is true that love of god’s will can be found in whatever happens, but the prayer of petition is best understood, not as an attempt at influencing the ways things go, but as an expression of, and a request for, devotion to God through the way of things.
Devotion | God | Love | Prayer | Superstition | Will | Wisdom | God |
Ancrene Wisse, aka Ancrene Riwle NULL
You ought to say fewer fixed prayers so that you may do more reading. Reading is good prayer. Reading teaches us how to pray, and what to pray for, and then prayer achieves it. In the course of reading, when the heart is pleased, there arises a spirit of devotion which is worth many prayers.
Devotion | Good | Heart | Prayer | Reading | Spirit | Worth |
Waldo Beach, fully William Waldo Beach
It is not just negative inertia and caution which lie behind racial discrimination, but the positive counterfaiths which produce them. The “conflicting valuations” turn out to be a warfare of the gods in the soul of man. Ultimately the racial problem is not one of hypocrisy but idolatry.
Charisma is the ability to inspire followers with devotion and enthusiasm to a cause. It encourages disciples rather than independent persons. It is a way of investing oneself with authority over other rather than vesting others with authority over themselves.
Ability | Authority | Cause | Charisma | Devotion | Enthusiasm |
Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges
Music being the universal expression of the mysterious and supernatural, the best that man has ever attained to, is capable of uniting in common devotion minds that are only separated by creeds, and it comforts our hope with a brighter promise of unity than any logic offers.
In visions of wisdom, in devotion to the good, in submission to beauty, and when overwhelmed by the holy, we awake to behold existence in this relationship. In reverence, suffering, and humility we discover our existence and find the bridge that leads from existence to God. And this is religion.
Beauty | Devotion | Existence | God | Good | Humility | Relationship | Religion | Reverence | Submission | Suffering | Wisdom |
All of one’s life can be a “reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice” to deity, a sacrifice whose value depends on the quality of life, and this depends on the depth of the devotion to all good things, to all life’s possibilities, neither as mine nor as not mine but as belonging to God’s creatures and thus to God.
Iskander Mirza, fully Major-General Sahibzada Sayyid Iskander Ali Mirza
Democracy without education is hypocrisy without limitation.
The message of the Bhagavad Gita is that each human life has but one ultimate end and purpose: to realize the Eternal Self within and thus to know, finally and fully, the joy of union with God, the Divine Ground of Being (Brahman). Whereas such knowledge was traditionally sought in retreat from the world, the Gita, without omitting that option, teaches that it may be attained in the midst of the world through nonattached action in the context of devotion (bhakti) to God.
Action | Devotion | Eternal | God | Joy | Knowledge | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Self | World |