This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour's reflection to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.
Advice | Imagination | Learning | Reading | Reflection | Scholar | Wisdom |
Your experiences matter only because of how you perceive them, and become the master of your own thoughts, you can control what filters into your subconscious. It becomes a better reflection of what you actually desire and “broadcasts” to the infinite realm clear messages of those desires.
Better | Control | Desire | Reflection |
Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.
Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
Man | Reflection |
Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree (for all forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, or bear false witness) and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in which all religions differ, which are totally unconnected with morality.
Morality | Murder | Observation | Reading | Reflection | Society | Time | Witness | Society |
Love is the creative power of the universe that manifests as strength and beauty. To love is to know God and the inmost nature of the ultimate Reality… Love is letting go of fear and worry… Love consecrates life… By letting go of separateness we see love as the reflection of our own self and harmony in the inconsistencies and imperfections of the existence and explore joy in the midst of the pains and problems of life.
Beauty | Existence | Fear | God | Harmony | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Power | Problems | Reality | Reflection | Self | Strength | Universe | Worry | God |
The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world.
Law | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Reflection | Thinking | Thought | World | Thought |
There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts; those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.”
Mind | Reflection | Thinking |
Theology is reflection upon the reality of worship and explication of it. As such it is a rational affair… faith seeking to understand.
Faith | Reality | Reflection | Theology | Worship |
Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
Prayer is not just the informing of God of our needs, for He already knows them. God does not show Himself equally to all creatures. This does not mean that he has favorites, that He decides to help some and to abandon others, but the difference occurs because it is impossible for Him to manifest Himself to certain hearts under the conditions they set up. The sunlight plays no favorites, but its reflection is very different on a lake and on a swamp.
God | Prayer | Reflection | God |
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it in turn will look sourly at you; laugh at it, and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion.
Man | Reflection | Will | World |
Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time, and across faiths that it suggests a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain.
Reflection | Time |
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Body | Death | Fear | God | Individual | Reflection | God |
Depression, almost invariably, is a reflection of an individual's low estimation of oneself, because the depressed person feels that: "Things are going badly in my life;" and, "I am too weak and inadequate to handle these things or make them better, and therefore I am a pretty bad person."
Better | Depression | Estimation | Individual | Life | Life | Reflection |
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
Eternity | Existence | Force | Habit | Imagination | Nothing | Power | Present | Reason | Reflection | Thinking |