This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
No longer able to believe in the Church religion, whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life's meaning in personal enjoyment. And then among the upper classes what is called the "Renaissance of science and art" took place, which was really not only a denial of every religion, but also an assertion that religion was unnecessary.
Assertion | Church | Falsehood | Meaning | Religion | Science |
I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
Consciousness | God | Mother | Religion | Sin | Will | God |
Pope Leo I, aka Pope Leo The Great, Pope Saint Leo I NULL
There is for all one common measure of joy, because as our Lord the destroyer of sin and death finds none free from charge, so is He come to free us all.
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence.
Sin |
Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry and sin not.
Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
In the morning of life, before its wearisome journey, The youthful soul doth expand, in the simple luxury of being; It hath not contracted its wishes, nor set a limit on its hopes; The wing of fancy is unclipped, and sin hath not seared the feelings: Each feature is stamped with immortality, for all its desires are infinite, And it seeketh an ocean of happiness, to fill the deep hollow within.
Thou shalt not, it is said, make unto thee any graven image of God. The same commandment should apply when God is taken to mean the living part of every human being, the part that cannot be grasped. It is a sin that, however much it is committed against us, we almost continually commit ourselves—Except when we love.
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
This passage from nothingness to real being, this quitting of oneself is a birth accompanied by pain, for by it natural love is excluded. All grief except grief for sin comes from love of the world. In God is neither sorrow, nor grief, nor trouble. Wouldst thou be free from all grief and trouble, abide and walk in God, and to God alone. As long as love of the creature is in us, pain cannot cease.
The pastorate was formed against a sort of intoxication of religious behavior, examples of which are found throughout the Middle East in the second, third, and fourth centuries, and to which certain Gnostic sects in particular bear striking and indisputable testimony. In at least some of these Gnostic sects, in fact, the identification of matter with evil, and as absolute evil, obviously entailed certain consequences. This might be, for example, a kind of vertigo or enchantment provoked by a sort of unlimited asceticism that could lead to suicide: freeing oneself from matter as quickly as possible. There is also the idea, the theme, of destroying matter thorough the exhaustion of the evils it contains, of committing every possible sin, going to the very end of the domain of evil opened up by matter, and thus destroying matter. Let us sin, then, and sin to infinity. There is also the theme of the nullification of the world of the law, to destroy which one must first destroy the law, that is to say, break every law. One must respond to every law established by the world, or by the powers of the world, by violating it, systematically breaking the law and in effect, overthrowing the reign of the one who created the world.
Absolute | Asceticism | Destroy | Evil | Law | Sin | World | Asceticism |
Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
The high rate of unemployment among teenagers, and especially black teenagers, is both a scandal and a serious source of social unrest. Yet it is largely a result of minimum wage laws. We regard the minimum wage law as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books.
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
Church |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin... I want you all to treasure death and suffering more than life and to appreciate their cleansing and purifying character. Death which is an Eternal verity is revolution, as birth and after is slow and steady evolution. Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself... All fear is a sign of want of faith... Hate the sin and love the sinner.
Birth | Death | Eternal | Fear | Growth | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Sin | Suffering |
Behind the repudiation of the ceremonial by the reformers lay a radically different conceptual world, a world in which text was everything, sign nothing... would take centuries for the Church of England to acknowledge and try to recover what it had lost... its place text ('the word') became in its own way a different sort of worshipped image, one which sometimes excluded feeling and the deep movements of the unconscious mind which ritual had faithfully fed. It is not, of course, that poetry or powerful preaching cannot express feeling, but that part of our human consciousness is pre-literate, both historically and in our personal childhood experience, and the whole of our experience cannot necessarily be captured by words. It may be important to lay wordless experiences alongside the wordy ones, as in music, colour, form, movement and smell.
Childhood | Church | Consciousness | Experience | Important | Mind | Poetry | World |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Hate the sin and not the sinner" is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.
No sin is so light that it may be overlooked. No sin is so heavy that it may not be repented of.
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
I advise you to guard against atheism and materialism. The biggest blunder made by Europe was the separation of Church and State. This deprived their culture of moral soul and diverted it to the atheistic materialism.