This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guild or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
Beauty | Compassion | Despair | Dogma | Faith | Fear | Hope | Ignorance | Joy | Learning | Love | Optimism | Pessimism | Reason | Selfishness | Sin | Truth | Beauty |
How much happier would the religious history of the world been if the different religions and sects had seen their role as contributors to a common stream of seeking for the Ultimate, which always escapes the conceptual net, yet perennially inspires the search. Actually many in the modern world are becoming tolerant toward religion in the wrong way. Their tolerance is not a product of understanding but is bred of indifference. They see the conventional forms in which religion is practiced as empty shells although they excite in their defense belligerent intolerance.
Defense | History | Indifference | Intolerance | Religion | Search | Understanding | World | Wrong |
The historical record of religions on tolerance is drenched in the blood of intolerance.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Age generally makes men more tolerant; youth is always discontented. The tolerance of age is the result of the ripeness of a judgment which, not merely as the result of indifference, is satisfied even with what is inferior, but, more deeply taught by the grave experience of life, has been led to perceive the substantial, sold worth of the object in question. The insight then to which - in contradistinction fro those ideals - philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself.
Age | Experience | Good | Grave | Ideals | Indifference | Insight | Judgment | Life | Life | Men | Object | Philosophy | Question | Reason | World | Worth | Youth | Youth |
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer care about religion.
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions.
In a republic, we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.
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Suppleness is an extremely important quality of soul... When you find tolerance in yourself for the competing demands of the soul, life becomes more complicated, but also more interesting. An example might be the contradictory needs of solitude and social life.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Of all religions, the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
Life is simply time given to man to learn how to live. Mistakes are always part of learning. The real dignity of life consists in cultivating a fine attitude towards our own mistakes and those of others. It is the fine tolerance of a fine soul. Man becomes great, not through never making mistakes, but by profiting by those he does make; by being satisfied with a single rendition of a mistake, not encoring it into a continuous performance; by getting from it the honey of new, regenerating inspiration with no irritating sting of morbid regret; by building better to-day because of his poor yesterday; and by rising with renewed strength, finer purpose and freshened courage every time he falls.
Better | Courage | Dignity | Inspiration | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Learn |
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, — the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
I see the clouds part slowly, and I hear a cry of protest against the bigot. The restraining hand of tolerance is laid upon the inquisitor, and the humanist utters a message of peace to the persecuted. Instead of the cry, "Burn the heretic!" men study the human soul with sympathy, and there enters into their hearts a new reverence for that which is unseen.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
The idea of brotherhood redawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed; and thinkers of great soul like Lessing challenge the world to say which is more godlike, the hatred and tooth-and-nail grapple of conflicting religions, or sweet accord and mutual helpfulness. Ancient prejudice of man against his brother-man wavers and retreats before the radiance of a more generous sentiment, which will not sacrifice men to forms, or rob them of the comfort and strength they find in their own beliefs. The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations.
Age | Association | Brotherhood | Challenge | Comfort | Man | Men | Prejudice | Sacrifice | Sentiment | Soul | Strength | Thinkers | Will | World | Association |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance — the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).