This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wilhelm Büchsel, fully Wilhelm Karl von Gotthilf Büchsel
Orthodoxy can be learnt from others; living faith must be a matter of personal experience.
Character | Experience | Faith |
Your awareness of your self-worth is not a contradiction to the obligation to be humble. Humility is not a lack of awareness of your positive accomplishments and abilities. Only a fool is not aware of what he really is an this is not humility. Humility is the internalized awareness with every fiber of your body that everything, yes everything, you have is not your own. Rather it is a gift from the Almighty who bestowed His kindness on you. The more a person actually feels that what he has is a gift the greater is his humility.
Awareness | Body | Character | Contradiction | Humility | Kindness | Obligation | Self | Self-worth | Worth | Awareness |
Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose
The meaning of life is to become inseparably one with God the transcendental Bliss and God the universal Peace. The meaning of life is to achieve unconditional self-giving and a self-giving will... complete faith in oneself and a birthless and deathless faith in God. Life is love... Life needs a dream and a goal... Transcendence is the glorious beginning of human perfection... Who am I? I am my life’s unfinished God-manifestation.
Beginning | Character | Faith | Giving | God | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Peace | Perfection | Self | Will | God |
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon
Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed.
The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed; and discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age.
Age | Better | Character | Discussion | Error | Good | Passion | Personality | Truth |
W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
The astonishing thing about him [man] is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals, far removed from his material surroundings and animal activities, and in no way suggested by them, yet for which, such is his affection, he is willing to endure toils and privations, to sacrifice pleasures, to disdain griefs and frustrations. The inner truth is that every man is himself a creator, by birth and nature, an artist, an architect and fashioner of worlds.
Birth | Character | Disdain | Ideals | Ideas | Man | Nature | Passion | Sacrifice | Truth | Vision |
“What” we do belongs to the world. In the “how,” the way we do it, we infallibly revel to ourselves whether our attitude is in harmony with the inner law or in contradiction to it, in accordance with our right form or opposed to it, open to Divine Being or closed to it. What is our right “form”? It is none other than that in which we are transparent to Divine Being. And to be transparent means that we are able to experience Divine Being in our selves and to reveal it in the world.
Character | Contradiction | Experience | Harmony | Law | Means | Right | World |
If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins.
It often falls out, that the end of passion is the beginning of repentance.
Beginning | Character | Passion | Repentance |