This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beyond the limits of his confining skin, no man can own any thing. “Property” refers not to things owned but to the rights granted by society; they must periodically be re-examined in the light of social justice.
Justice | Light | Man | Property | Rights | Society | Wisdom |
Sometimes prayer is more than a light before us; it is alight within us.
Leaves seem light and useless, and idle and wavering, and changeable - they even dance; yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing, He has give us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous convention of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Convention | Individual | Murder | Politics | War | Wisdom | Murder |
If a child who wanted to be a teacher I would bid him Godspeed as if he were going to war. For indeed the war against prejudice, greed and ignorance is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their lives not less because they may live to see some faction of the battle won.
Battle | Eternal | Greed | Ignorance | Prejudice | War | Wisdom | Child | Teacher |
If scientific discovery has not been an unalloyed blessing, if it has conferred on mankind the power not only to create but also to annihilate, it has at the same time provided humanity with a supreme challenge and a supreme testing.
Challenge | Discovery | Humanity | Mankind | Power | Time | Wisdom | Discovery |
No man who witnessed the tragedies of the last war, no man who can imagine the unimaginable possibilities of the next war can advocate war out of irritability or frustration or impatience.
Impatience | Man | War | Wisdom |
There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.
Defects | Imperfection | Life | Life | Light | Perfection | Progress | Suffering | Wholeness | Wisdom |
In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war - we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint.
Age | Obligation | Peace | Restraint | Strength | War | Wisdom |
The problem of our purpose is a religious problem... Our purpose is derived from faith and is imposed onto reality by our own souls. But faith and religious truth themselves are not absolute. They are relative. Thus the answers one gives to questions about the purpose of life must necessarily be relative to a time, a place, a tradition... To know and worship God means, in Baha’ullah’s words, to promote the unity of the human race and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men”... Someday there will be a global society in which humanity will realize its spiritual and moral potential... The destiny of mankind, actually, is the ultimate creation of the world civilization. It is only in the service of such a cause that I find the meaning and purpose of life.
Absolute | Cause | Civilization | Destiny | Faith | Global | God | Human race | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Mankind | Meaning | Means | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Reality | Service | Society | Spirit | Time | Tradition | Truth | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words | World | Worship | Society | God |
The march of Providence is so slow and our desires to impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our mean of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
History | Hope | Humanity | Individual | Life | Life | Progress | Providence | Wisdom | Work |