This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The heart of man is more dangerous than mountains and rivers, more difficult to understand than Heaven itself.
Heart | Heaven | Man | Understand |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
Music illustrates the primordial forces of nature, while li reflects the products of creation. Heaven represents the principle of eternal motion, while Earth represents the principle of remaining still, and these two principles of motion and rest permeate life between Heaven and Earth.
Earth | Eternal | Heaven | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Principles | Rest |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
Music expresses the harmony of the universe, while rituals express the order of the universe. Through harmony all things are influenced, and through order all things have a proper place. When rituals and music are well established, we have the Heaven and Earth functioning in perfect order.
The wise man… when he must govern, know how to do nothing… In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern?
Heaven | Man | Nothing | Silence | Spirit | Time | Will | Wise |
The net of Heaven is large and wide, but it lets nothing through.
Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death.
Conquest | Consciousness | Death | Earth | Enlightenment | Experience | Freedom | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Perfection | Suffering | Unity |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
What is God-given is called nature; to follow nature is called Tao (the Way); to cultivate the way is called culture. Before joy, anger, sadness and happiness are expressed, they are called the inner self; when they are expressed to the proper degree, they are called harmony. The inner self is the correct foundation of the world, and the harmony is the illustrious Way. When a man has achieved the inner self and harmony, the heaven and earth are orderly and the myriad of things are nourished and grow thereby.
Anger | Culture | Earth | God | Harmony | Heaven | Joy | Man | Nature | Sadness | Self | World | Happiness |
Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
Every man must get to heaven his own way.
An honest man feels that he must pay heaven for every hour of happiness with a good spell of hard unselfish work to make others happy. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Good | Happy | Heaven | Man | Right | Wealth | Work | Happiness |
Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
All religions must be tolerated, for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit.
Earth | Eternal | Existence | Heaven | Important | Man | Mind | Need | Spirit | World | Absurdity | Truths |
Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.
When flowers are full of heaven descended dews, they always hang their heads; but men hold theirs the higher the more they receive, getting proud as they get full.