This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We fail to wonder... This is the tragedy of every man... Life is routine, and routine is resistance to the wonder. Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves... The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe... Awe is a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality... Awe precedes faith; it is at the root of faith. We must grow in awe in order to reach faith... The ineffable inhabits the magnificent and the common, the grandiose and the tiny facts of reality alike... Slight and simple things may be a glimpse of God? kinship with the spirit of being? an eternal flash of a will?
Awe | Beginning | Eternal | Insight | Life | Life | Meaning | Mystery | Order | Reality | Spirit | Tragedy | Wisdom |
John M. Mason, fully John Mitchell Mason
When I go to the house of God I do not want amusement; I want the doctrine which is according to godliness. I want to hear the remedy against the harassing of my guilt and the disorder of my affections. I want to be led from weariness and disappointment to that goodness which filleth the hungry soul. I want to have light upon the mystery of Providence; to be taught how the judgments of the Lord are right; how I shall be prepared for duty and for trial; how I may fear God all the days of my life, and close them in peace.
Doctrine | Duty | Fear | God | Guilt | Light | Lord | Mystery | God |
I've noticed a facinating phenomenon in my thiry years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelvant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anyting except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the instituion overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the instituion is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Abstract | Care | Individual | Logic | Man | Mystery | People | Science | Teach | Truth | Work | Writing | Poem |
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 |
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.
Knowledge | Life | Life | Mystery | Nature | Universe | Will | Wonder | Think |
Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
No illumination can sweep all mystery out of the world. After the departed darkness the shadows remain.
Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.
Beauty | Experience | Mystery | Nature | People | Universe | Wonder | World | Beauty |
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
Ko Hung, aka Ge Hong, courtesy name Zhichuan
Where the Mystery is present, joy is infinite; where the Mystery has departed, efficacy is exhausted and the spirit disappears.
Leland Stanford, fully Amasa Leland Stanford
In a condition of society and under an industrial organization which places labor completely at the mercy of capital, the accumulations of capital will necessarily be rapid, and an unequal distribution of wealth is at once to be observed.
Labor | Mercy | Organization | Society | Wealth | Will | Society |
Lev Shestov, fully Lev Isaakovich Shestov, born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann
We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life.
Mystery |
The initial mystery that attends each journey is: how did the traveller reach his starting point in the first place?
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.
Body | Eccentricity | Life | Life | Malice | Mystery | Poetry | Understand |
He who proclaims the existence of the Infinite, and none can avoid it — accumulates in that affirmation more of the supernatural than is to be found in all the miracles of all the religions; for the notion of the Infinite presents that double character that forces itself upon us and yet is incomprehensible. When this notion seizes upon our understanding we can but kneel ... I see everywhere the inevitable expression of the Infinite in the world; through it the supernatural is at the bottom of every heart. The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite. As long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on human thought, temples will be erected for the worship of the Infinite, whether God is called Brahma, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus; and on the pavement of these temples, men will be seen kneeling, prostrated, annihilated by the thought of the Infinite.
Character | Existence | God | Inevitable | Men | Miracles | Mystery | Thought | Understanding | Will | Worship | God | Thought |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
Consequences | Experience | Glory | Life | Life | Mystery | Think |