This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lord Acton, John Emerich Dalberg-Acton
Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.
Fanaticism | Religion | Wisdom |
For this cause he came into the world; that he might be a witness to the truth; a living, unimpeachable witness of the truth that shall make us free - the truth of man’s religion (reunion) with God, through absolute spiritual self consciousness - with God - with the Eternal, Omnipotent and Omniscient Source and Fountain of Life, “in whom we live and move and have our being,” without whom we are not!
Absolute | Cause | Character | Consciousness | Eternal | God | Life | Life | Man | Religion | Self | Truth | Witness | World | God |
Mostly, reform in religion is rational. But if the religion be already too rational, reform must be emotional.
Sharing is the great and imperative need of our time. An unshared life is not living. He who shares does not lessen but greatens his life, especially if sharing be done not formally nor conventionally, but rather with such heartiness as springs out of an understanding of the meaning of the religion of sharing.
Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Religion | Time | Understanding |
Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope | Wisdom |
Even granting the author [Rutherford]... his main principle, ‘That every man’s own happiness is the ultimate end, which nature and reason teach him to pursue’, why may not nature and reason teach him, too, to have some desire to see others happy as well as himself, or give him some delight in doing what seems fit and right, if these things do not interfere with his own happiness?... Why may he not, with the pursuit of that end, join some other pursuits not inconsistent with it, instead of transforming every benevolent affection, every moral view, into self-interest? This surely neither does honour to religion, nor justice to human nature.
Character | Desire | Happy | Human nature | Justice | Man | Nature | Reason | Religion | Right | Self | Self-interest | Teach | Happiness |
Henry Christopher "H.C." Bailey
The origin of civilization is man's determination to do nothing for himself which he can get done for him.
Civilization | Determination | Man | Nothing | Wisdom |
Unless there is a recovery of the true dualism or, what amounts to the same thing, a reaffirmation of the truths of the inner life in some form - traditional or critical, religious or humanistic - civilization in any sense that has been attached to that term hitherto is threatened at its base.
J.M. Barrie, fully Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet
One's religion is whatever he is most interested in.
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it.
Civilization | Education | Humanity | Individual | Knowledge | Man | Nature | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Clive Bell, fully Arthur Clive Heward Bell
Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means similar states of mind.
Aesthetic | Art | Ecstasy | Family | Means | Men | Mind | Religion | Wisdom | Art | Circumstance |