This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You will not mind if I say that where there is unhappiness in a house and there is an impression of someone [i.e. a departed spirit] coming back, it is because you make for that spirit a Garden of Memory in which it can live and revive its sufferings. Unless you are, consciously or unconsciously, in a state of mind in which this impression can vivify itself, you will not be troubled. Haven't you discovered that these things only happen to you when you are in a bad emotional state, physically or mentally disturbed? Don't you realize that you yourself vivify this memory?
Change | Consciousness | Control | Harmony | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Peace | Present | Regard | Time | Work |
Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually.
For the benefit of the flowers, we water the thorns, too.
Indispensable | Peace |
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated
How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.
When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another.
Belief | Books | Destroy | Force | God | Good | Insanity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Need | People | Philosophy | Religion | Taste | Time | Words | God | Understand |
No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed.
Change | Childhood | Life | Life | Religion | Sense | Time | Truth | Understanding | Woman | World |
The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.
I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples.
Secretary of War Stanton used to get out of patience with Lincoln because he was all the time pardoning men who ought to be shot.
Effort | Men | Mob | Occupation | Organization | Past | Power | Principles | Purpose | Purpose | Success | Work |
The line of least resistance in the progress of civilization is to make that theoretical postulate real by the continually increasing force of the world's public opinion.
Hell is the here and now. Heaven too. Stop being afraid of hell and dream of paradise, because the one and the other is set in the present moment. Every time you fall in love, to ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy or confront someone, fall right into hellfire.
Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.
Government | Important | Peace | People | Rights | Government |
The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.
The popular tendency is to listen approvingly to the most extreme statements and claims of politicians and orators who seek popularity by declaring their own country right in everything and other countries wrong in everything.
Human nature | Nature | Peace | War |
Set your heart at rest. The fairyland buys not the child of me.
So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall'n on th' inventors' heads. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Horatio at V, ii)
She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd; she is a woman, therefore may be won; she is Lavinia, therefore must be lov'd. What, man! more water glideth by the mill than wots the miller of; and easy it is of a cut loaf to steal a shive.