This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whenever I hear people talking about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of the emotions.
Emotions | Ends | Ideas | Love | Men | Mission | People | Talking | Wisdom |
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is thy bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things do her homage, the very least as feeling her care; and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.
Angels | Care | God | Harmony | Joy | Law | Men | Mother | Peace | Power | Wisdom | World |
God is merely tuning the soul as an instrument, in this life. And these joys of the Christian, are only the notes and chords that are sounded out in the preparation - preludes to the perfect harmony that shall flood the soul - forerunners of the perfected and rapturous joy that shall bless the soul, in that exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
Eternal | Glory | God | Harmony | Joy | Life | Life | Soul | Wisdom |
When the Copernican Revolution superseded the ancient Polemic world view, the earth took its rightful place as one planet among many. Man was no longer the center of the universe and though his self-image was deflated, he grew in maturity. In the same way, we must take our rightful place in nature - not as its self-centered and profligate "master" with the divine right of kings to exploit and despoil, but as one species living in harmony with the whole.
Earth | Exploit | Harmony | Man | Nature | Revolution | Right | Self | Universe | Wisdom | World |
Souls act according to the laws of final causes through appetitions, ends, and means. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes or motions. And the two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony with one another.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Conservation | Harmony | Land | Men | Wisdom |
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.
Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.
Consideration | Democracy | Good | Men | Public | Servitude | Talking | Will | Wisdom | Work |
When we say that law ‘embodies’ values we are talking metaphorically. What does it mean? Values are only ‘embodied’ in law in the sense that and to the extent that human beings approve of the laws they have because of the state of affairs they are supposed to secure, being states of affairs which are on some ground deemed just or otherwise good. This need not be articulated at all.
Security means inner harmony of the personality with the environment. Man must learn how to balance emotional stress against his own emotional supports. And he must be mature.
Balance | Harmony | Man | Means | Personality | Security | Wisdom | Learn |
As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life.
Art | Chance | Civilization | Contradiction | Feelings | Harmony | Imagination | Law | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Necessity | Play | Reality | Reason | Thought | Unity | Wisdom | Art | Thought |
The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.
Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |