This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No religion is an island. We are all involved with one another. Spiritual betrayal on the part of one of us affects the faith of all of us.
Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try,no hell below us, above us only sky,imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there's no countries,it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one,I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one. Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, imagine all the people, sharing all the world. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.
Brotherhood | Greed | Hell | Hope | Kill | Life | Life | Need | Nothing | Religion | Will | Wonder | World |
Beverley Nichols, fully John Beverley Nichols
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
Poetry |
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the world "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as dx/dt = K(d^2x/dy^2) much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plain man, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change.
Aesthetic | Change | Consideration | Law | Poetry | Prediction | Thought | Will | World | Thought |
The highest peak of spiritual living is not necessarily reached in rare moments of ecstasy; the highest peak lies wherever we are and may be ascended in a common deed. Religion is not made for extraordinary occasions.
Religion |
Religion is more than a creed or a doctrine, more than faith or piety; it is an everlasting fact in the universe, something that exists outside knowledge and experience, an order of being, the holy dimension of existence. It does not emanate from the affections and moods, aspirations and visions of the soul. It is not a divine force in us, a mere possibility, left to the initiative of man, something that may or may not take place, but an actuality, the inner constitution of the universe, the system of divine values involved in every being and exposed to the activity of man, the ultimate in our reality. As an absolute implication of being, as an ontological entity, not as an adorning veneer for a psychical wish or for a material want, religion cannot be totally described in psychological or sociological terms.
Absolute | Creed | Faith | Force | Initiative | Knowledge | Order | Religion | System |
Humanity is an unfinished task, and so is religion. The Law, the creed, the teaching and the wisdom are here, yet without the outburst of prophetic demands coming upon us again and again, religion may become fossilized.
There is no vacuum of religion. Religion is neither the outgrowth of imagination nor the product of will. It is not an inner process, a feeling, or a thought, and should not be looked upon as a bundle of episodes in the life of man… The pious man believe that there is a secret interrelationship among all events, that the sweep of all we are doing reaches beyond the horizon of our comprehension, that there is a history of God and man in which everything is involved…Religion to him is the integration of the detail into the whole, the infusion of the momentary into the lasting. As time and space in any perception, so is the totality of life implied in every act of piety. There is an objective coherency that holds all episodes together… Man does not produce what is overwhelming and holy. The wonder occurs to him when he is ready to accept it.
God | History | Imagination | Integration | Life | Life | Man | Pious | Religion | Space | Time | Wonder | God |
It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.
Priests are no more necessary to religion than politicians to patriotism.
Religion |
The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us. Religion has traditionally been the domain of such fundamental inquiries within a spiritual framework, but mindfulness has little to do with religion, except in the most fundamental meaning of the word, as an attempt to appreciate the deep mystery of being alive and to acknowledge being vitally connected to all that exists.
Awareness | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Means | Mind | Mindfulness | Mystery | Present | Religion | Understanding | World | Awareness |
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Theoretically, religion wishes to make men serene and inwardly peaceful by reaching a loving and forgiving god. But in practice, there is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions.
Men | Punishment | Religion | Wishes |
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
That is the arrogance of the kind of academic narrowness one too often sees; it is trapped in its own predictable prejudices, its own stale categories. It is the mind dulled to the poetry of existence. It’s fashionable now to demand some economic payoff from space, some reward to prove it was all worthwhile. Those who say this resemble the apelike creatures in 2001. They are fighting for food among themselves, while one separates himself from them and moves to the slab, motivated by awe. That is the point they are missing. He is the one who evolves into a human being; he is the one who understands the future.
Religious rights, and religious liberty, are things of inestimable value. For these have many of our ancestors suffered and died; and shall we, in the sunshine of prosperity, desert that glorious cause, from which no storms of adversity or persecution could make them swerve? Let us consider if as a duty of the first rank with respect to moral obligation, to transmit to our posterity, and provide, as far as we can, for transmitting, unimpaired, to the latest generations, that generous zeal for religion and liberty, which makes the memory of our forefathers so truly illustrious.
Adversity | Duty | Memory | Rank | Religion | Respect | Zeal | Respect |