This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Be sure to find a place for intellectual and cultural interests outside your daily occupation. It is necessary that you do so if this business of living is not to turn to dust and ashes in your mouth. Moreover, do not overlook the claims of religion as the explanation of an otherwise unintelligible world. It is not the fast tempo of modern life that kills but the boredom, a lack of strong interest and failure to grow that destroy. It is the feeling that nothing is worth while that makes men ill and unhappy.
Business | Destroy | Failure | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Occupation | Religion | Wisdom | World | Worth | Failure | Business |
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
To make clear fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them for the fast in the emotional life of an individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of a man... They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.
Ends | Important | Individual | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Revelation | Wisdom |
Randolph S. Foster, fully Randolph Sinks Foster
He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it. Fundamentally, indeed, every religion is in this same way a religion of love for all those whom it embraces; while cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
Cruelty | Intolerance | Love | Religion | Wisdom | Cruelty |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded.
True religion is not what men see and admire; it is what God sees and loves... The cheerful consecration of all the powers of the soul; the worship which rising above all outward forms, ascends to God in the sweetest, dearest communion - a worship often too deep for utterance, and than which the highest heaven knows nothing more sublime.
Consecration | God | Heaven | Men | Nothing | Religion | Soul | Wisdom | Worship | God |
Gersonides, abbreviation of first letters as RalBaG from Levi ben Gerson NULL
By means of rational thought we have reached the opinion that God knows in advance only the possibilities open to a man in his freedom, not the particular decisions he will make.. It is the opinion of our religion that God never changes... and yet we find in the words of the prophets that God does repent over some things... It is impossible to solve this contradiction if we adopt the view that God knows particular things as particulars.
Contradiction | Freedom | God | Man | Means | Opinion | Religion | Thought | Will | Wisdom | Words | God | Thought |