This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable.
Religion | Superstition |
The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again... The wretchedness of religion is at once an express of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the opposed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Consciousness | Criticism | Esteem | Heart | Man | People | Protest | Religion | Self | Self-esteem | Soul | World |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Poetry |
The function of religion is to confront the paradoxes and contradictions and the ultimate mysteries of man and the cosmos; to make sense and reason of what lies beneath the irreducible irrationalities of man’s life; to pierce the surrounding darkness with pinpoints of life, or occasionally to rip away for a startling moment the cosmic shroud.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Science has supposedly supplanted religion – but it has simply become our new religious form and an even more powerful cultural support.
One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.
The Problem - Myth might be defined simply as "other people's religion," to which an equivalent definition of religion would be "misunderstood mythology"... Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts of the human will... Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Dreams | History | Imagination | Myth | People | Religion | Will | World |
Which is more misshapen - religion without virtue, or virtue without religion?
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Superstition consists in a senseless fear of the gods, religion in the pious worship of them.
Fear | Pious | Religion | Superstition | Worship |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character.
Business | Character | Force | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Business |
The object of religion is conduct; and conduct is really, however men may overlay it with philosophical disquisitions, the simplest thing in the world. That is to say, it is the simplest thing in the world as far as understanding is concerned; as regards doing, it is the hardest thing in the world.
The true meaning of religion is not merely morality, but morality touched by emotion.
The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Creed | Dogma | Future | Illusion | Life | Life | Mankind | Philosophy | Poetry | Race | Religion | Rest | Science | Time | Tradition | Will | World |
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretive both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.