This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not Death, neither is it theirs. Death is but crossing the world, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still.
Abbé Pierre, born Henri Marie Joseph Grouès
What matters today is not the difference between those who believe and those who do not believe, but the difference between those who care and those who don’t.
Care |
An open mind should be more than a catch-all receptacle. It should have a screening mechanism to keep out the trivial, a sorting capacity to organize ideas and reconcile contradictions, and a critical tool to help us decide what we believe. That’s the difference between a mind that receives information and a mind that thinks.
The world of reality has its bounds. The world of imagination is boundless.
Imagination | Reality | World |
The visions of the mystics are determined in content by their belief, and are due to the dream imagination working upon the mass of theological material which fills the mind.
Belief | Imagination | Mind |
I’m learning the difference between humor and comedy, between the laugh that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. Humor is giving, and comedy is taking away. Humor is companionable, comedy cold. Humor is character, comedy personality.
Character | Comedy | Giving | Humor | Learning | Personality |
It is in deeds that man becomes aware of what his life really is, of his power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and to ruin; of his ability to derive joy and to bestow it upon others; to relieve and to increase his own and other people’s tensions. It is in the employment of his will, not in reflection, that he meets his own self as it is; not as he should like it to be.
Ability | Deeds | Harm | Joy | Life | Life | Man | People | Power | Reflection | Self | Will | Deeds |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The true problems of living – in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc. – are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality.
Commitment | Economics | Education | Man | Marriage | Personality | Politics | Problems | Sense |
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 |
Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.
The only difference between men of great achievement and those who remain in mediocrity is that the great pay little attention to what has been done and what obstacles or apparent reasons may stand in the way of achievement but devote themselves to contemplating what can or ought to be done. Those who allow their mental and emotional natures to recoil, refusing to let this sense reach out into the undiscovered, destroy their own capabilities and this keeps them always in the prison house of limitation. But it should be noted that prison is only the recoil or reflex of their own nature. Genius is that which goes on through conditions and circumstances and keeps eternally in the process of expansion and extension of achieving power.
Achievement | Attention | Circumstances | Destroy | Genius | Little | Mediocrity | Men | Nature | Power | Prison | Sense |
One person dies at the age of ten, another at the age of one hundred. Perfect saints die, and so do dangerous fools… Once dead, they are molding bones. As molding bones, they are equal. Who can tell the difference between them? Let us therefore grasp life’s moment – what is the point of worrying about the time after death?
Temperance is not the absence of passion, but is the transfiguring of passion into wholeness. Without it... you will have the senses usurping sovereignty and excluding the spirit; you will have them deciding good and evil and excluding God.
Absence | Evil | God | Good | Passion | Spirit | Wholeness | Will |
No man can complain that his calling takes him off from religion; his calling itself, and his very worldly employment in honest trades and offices, is a serving of God.
There is a difference between happiness and enjoyment. Happiness is the result of pursuing a goal. Pursuit of the goal generates an energizing sense of purpose. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is an immediate sensation of pleasure; a person can enjoy a piece of cake, a piece of art, a good joke – it gives pleasure but then passes.
Art | Enjoyment | Good | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Happiness |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.
Absence | Art | Cruelty | Discipline | Freedom | Ignorance | Inactivity | Lying | Murder | Treachery | War | Weapons | Words | World | Art |