This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whenever the hidden, the unfathomable, is experienced whenever the meaning of all things is felt and grasped, then it is ether the devoutness of silence, that most intimate feeling of the living God, that deepest force of religious intuition and emotion, which takes hold of man, or, again, it is the uplift to imagery which is stirred up within him, the poetry which sings in prayer of the ineffable.
Force | God | Intuition | Man | Meaning | Poetry | Prayer | Silence |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
We are capable of finding unending meaning in a world of constant, shimmering, sometimes threatening change. The task is to keep the question of life in question, and to find in it an unending source of joy and possibility, even in the darkest of times. It is within the constant overcoming of our own limitations and habits, and of the established views of our age, that passive happiness and unreflective contentment are lost, then to be replaced by joyful activity and a glimpse of a broader, more enriching, and more responsible awareness than we have been capable of before.
Age | Awareness | Change | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Question | World | Awareness | Happiness |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Values do not exist apart from our experience of them… what is not an experience cannot be of intrinsic value… intrinsic values, or immediate values, are subjective, or dependent on the state of mind of the beholder.
Experience | Mind |
All true prayer is worship – the ascription of worth to the Eternal. Without adoration, thanksgiving may become a miserliness, petition a selfish clamor, intercession a currying of special favors for our friends, and even contemplation may turn into a refined indulgence.
Contemplation | Eternal | Indulgence | Prayer | Worship | Worth | Contemplation |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
If we persist in encouraging and educating only the intellect in our schools, we will inevitably create an instrumental conception of life, in which all human activity will be valued as a means to an end, never for itself.
Prayer is not a vain attempt to change God’s will: it is a filial desire to learn God’s will and share it. Prayer is not a substitute for work: it is the secret spring and indispensable ally of all true work – the clarifying of work’s goal, the purifying of its motives, and the renewing of its zeal.
Change | Desire | God | Indispensable | Motives | Prayer | Will | Work | Zeal | Learn |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is between one person and another is emptiness, nothingness, a space or field in which we can meet, talk, love, hate, hurt, nurture, encourage, and otherwise engage in ethically significant activity with one another. The between is the place wherein we are able to interact with one another, and it is a field of possibility, an opportunity as much as an emptiness to fill. Leaving the notion of emptiness to one side for the present, the betweenness of men and women works itself out in the way called “ethics,” which occasions and is the description of the consensual rules and structures of social existence.
Ethics | Existence | Hate | Love | Men | Opportunity | Present | Space |
Prayer transcends imposing our will upon others. Prayer represents opportunity to become more than such cycles by employing our science of feeling to bring new possibilities to an existing situation… Prayer is a concrete, measurable, and directive force in creation. Prayer is real. To pray is to do “something!
Force | Opportunity | Prayer | Science | Will |
Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
If the moral and physical fiber of its manhood and its womanhood is not a state concern, the question is, what is?
Question |
Parenthood: that state of being better chaperoned than you were before marriage.
Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.