This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The heart has its own reasons... The heart is a mystery - not a puzzle that can’t be solved, but a mystery in the religious sense: unfathomable, beyond manipulation, showing traces of the finger of God at work... Everything associated with the heart - relationship, emotion, passion - can only be grasped and appreciated with the tools of religion and poetry.
God | Heart | Mystery | Passion | Poetry | Relationship | Religion | Sense | Work | God |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Benjamin Cardozo, fully Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
The submergence of self in the pursuit of an ideal, the readiness to spend oneself without measure, prodigally, almost ecstatically, for something intuitively apprehended as great and noble, spend oneself one knows not why - some of us like to believe that this is what religion means.
From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things - the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals - and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same Great Mystery. Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue. The animals had rights - the right of man’s protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, and the right to freedom, and the right to man’s indebtedness - and in recognition of these rights the Lakota never enslaved an animal, and spared all life that was not needed for food and clothing. This concept of life and its relations was humanizing, and gave to the Lakota an abiding love. It filled his being with the joy and mystery of living; it gave him reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all. The Lakota could despise no creature, for all were of one blood, made by the same hand, and filled with the essence of the Great Mystery. In spirit, the Lakota were humble and meek. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” - this was true for the Lakota, and from the earth they inherited secrets long since forgotten. Their religion was sane, natural, and human.
Brotherhood | Despise | Earth | Existence | Force | Freedom | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Man | Mystery | Religion | Reverence | Right | Rights | Safe | Spirit | World | Friends |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The twin concepts of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics.
Politics | Punishment | Religion | Sin |
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
Beauty | Philosophy | Poetry | Beauty |
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
There is no age which religion does not become.
Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
Unless we place our religion and our treasure in the same thing, religion will always be sacrificed.
In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency …and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving — from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.