This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
R. W. Dixon, fully Richard Watson Dixon
For deep the cave of human consciousness; The thoughts, like light, upon its depths may press, Seeking and finding wonders numberless; But never may they altogether pierce The hollow gloom so sensitive and fierce Of the deep bosom: far the light may reach, There is a depth unreached; in clearest speech There is an echo from an unknown place: And in the dim, unknown, untrodden space Our life is hidden; were we all self-known, No longer should we live; a wonder shown Is wonderful no more; and being flies For ever from its own self-scrutinies. Here is the very effort of the soul To keep itself unmingled, safe, and whole In changes and the flitting feints of sense: Here essence holds a calm and sure defence; It is a guarded shrine and sacred grove, A fountain hidden where no foot may rove, A further depth within a sounded sea; A mirror ’tis from hour to hour left free By things reflected: and because ’tis so, Therefore the outer world and all its show Is as the music of the upper wave To the deep Ocean in his sunken cave; A part of its own self, yet but its play, Which doth the sunbeam and the cloud convey To central deeps, where in awful shade The stormless heart receives the things conveyed, Knowing the cloud by darkness, and the light By splendours dying through the infinite.
Effort | Gloom | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Music | Sacred | Wonder | World |
The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself... The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
Effort | Harmony | Intention | Longing | Man | Mind | Patience | Perseverance | Phenomena | Work | Theoretical |
Ralph Bunche, fully Ralph Johnson Bunche
To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL
There will then be new, more exalted levels that will still be hidden from you and beyond your ability to understand. Here again you will have to make the effort to believe. You must always start with faith regarding the levels that are as yet hidden from you, but eventually you will understand them as well. This is an ongoing process. Your faith must be so strong that it spreads to every one of your limbs. This faith will bring you to true wisdom.
Ability | Effort | Faith | Will | Understand |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Constantly you have to chant the name and glories of God and give up worldly thoughts as much as you can. With the greatest effort you may try to bring water into your field for your crops, but it may all leak out through holes in the ridges. Then all your efforts to bring the water by digging a canal will be futile. You will feel restless for God when your heart becomes pure and your mind free from attachment to the things of the world. Then alone will your prayer reach God.
The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
To the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in an effort to prove they are indestructible.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humor is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with ultimate ones. Both humor and faith are the expressions of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene. But any view of the whole immediately creates the problem of how the incongruities of life are to be dealt with; for the effort to understand the life, and our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and incongruities which do not fit into any neat picture of the whole. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.
Capacity | Effort | Existence | Faith | Freedom | Humor | Laughter | Life | Life | Meaning | Understand |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
If theology is an effort to construct a rational and systematic view of life out of the various and sometimes contradictory myths which are associated with a single religious tradition, philosophy carries the process one step further by seeking to dispense with the mythical basis altogether and resting its world-view entirely upon the ground of rational consistency. Thus for Hegel, religion is no more than primitive philosophy in terms of crude picture-thinking, which a more advanced rationality refines. This rationalization of myth is indeed inevitable and necessary, lest religion be destroyed by undisciplined and fantastic imagery or primitive and inconsistent myth. Faith must feed on reason. (Unamuno.) But reason must also feed on faith. Every authentic religious myth contains paradoxes of the relation between the finite and the eternal which cannot be completely rationalized without destroying the genius of true religion.
Effort | Eternal | Faith | Genius | Inevitable | Life | Life | Myth | Philosophy | Rationality | Reason | Religion | Theology |
For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance.
One way in which we seem predisposed to disbelieve Darwinism is that our brains are built - ironically, by evolution itself - to deal with events on radically different timescales from those that characterize evolutionary change. We are equipped to appreciate processes that take seconds, minutes, years, or, at most, decades to complete. Darwinism is a theory of cumulative processes so slow that they take between thousands and millions of decades to complete. It requires effort of the imagination to escape from the prison of familiar timescale.
Effort | Events | Evolution | Imagination | Prison |
Governments have worked hard to get growth started again. But, to the very limited degree that this effort temporarily succeeded in late 2009 and 2010, it did so by ignoring the underlying contradiction at the heart of our entire economic system
Contradiction | Effort | Growth | Heart | System |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
I've always been rather very one-sided about the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I didn't have much patience for what's called the humanities; even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work on it. It's only afterwards [sic] when I've gotten older and more relaxed that I've spread out a little bit--I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one-sided person and don't know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I've used it in a particular direction.
Effort | Intelligence | Little | Patience | Time | Work | Learn |
A common misconception among homeowners when it comes to home remodeling and renovation is that cost equals value. However, not every renovation or remodeling effort will pay off at closing.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb... But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?
Civilization | Earth | Effort | Fear | Heart | Knowing | Man | Men | Order | Spirit | Wants | Afraid |