This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We need to get rid of some false meanings that we give to the words eternal and eternity. The psychological idea connected with eternal life cannot be limited to the view that man is changed into another state at death, merely by the act of dying. It would be far more correct to say that it refers, first of all, to some change that man is capable of undergoing now, in this life, and one that is connected with the attainment of unity. The modern term psychology means literally the science of the soul. But in former times there actually existed a science of the soul based upon the idea that man is an imperfect state but capable of reaching a further state... No totality-act is possible; the will is separate from knowledge, the feeling from intellect.
Attainment | Change | Death | Eternal | Eternity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Means | Need | Psychology | Science | Soul | Unity | Will | Wisdom | Words |
Max Müller, fully Friedrich Max Müller
In order to discover truth, we must be truthful ourselves, and must welcome those who point out our errors as heartily as those who approve and confirm our discoveries.
For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.
God | Knowledge | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
Awareness | Conscience | Destiny | Difficulty | Isolation | Order | Rites | Silence | Solitude | Wisdom | Awareness |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. to me it is the extremist thinkable form of corruption, it has had the will to the ultimate corruption conceivably possible. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value a disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare to talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! To abolish any state of distress whatever has been profoundly inexpedient to it: it has lived on states of distress, it has created states of distress in order to externalize itself.
Blessings | Church | Corruption | Distress | Integrity | Nothing | Order | People | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Value |
We find the attribute of unchangingness always associated with the highest level of conscious experience. The experiences of truth are always similar. There is the changing mind, following time and change; and the unchanging mind behind it. There is the order of natural reasoning that goes with changing phenomena, and another above... The source of all truth lies in ‘unchangeable truth’ which is above the level of reason, and it is the internal perception of this unchangeable truth that endows man with the highest grade of being.
Change | Experience | Man | Mind | Order | Perception | Phenomena | Reason | Time | Truth | Wisdom | Following |
We want to live our lives as wise warriors and die as men. We may not even know what it is until the moments of our deaths. Then, the questions come. Have we worked to release another soul from pain? Have we opened a way that was once closed? Have we learned from the steeps and dips? Then we can rest assured that we have lived as men and died as warriors.
Never, never do great thoughts come to a man while he is discontented or fretful. There must be quiet in the temple of his soul before the windows of it will open for him to see out of them into the infinite. Quiet is what heavenly powers move in. It is in silence that the stars move on, and it is in quiet that our souls are visited from on high.
If we start with the visible, then in order to explain it we must pass into its parts. If we seek to explain man by his organs, his organs by the cells composing them, the atoms by electrons, we lose sight of the man as a whole. Under the microscope the man himself completely disappears... The idea behind organised matter is overlooked. That which is manifest in time and space engages its attention, and so it cannot help looking for causal origin in the smaller constituent parts of any organism - and also in preceding time, i.e. in the past.
A truth which one has never heard causes the soul surprise at first, which touches it keenly; but when it is accustomed to it, it becomes very insensible there.
Novalis, pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg NULL
The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.
The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, our soul exists in space inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity.
Body | Day | Health | Life | Life | Majority | Misfortune | Nothing | Soul | Space | System | Wisdom |
Babe Paley, fully Barbara Cushing "Babe" Mortimer Paley
The common course of things is in favor of happiness. Happiness is the rule, misery the exception. Were the order reversed, our attention would be called to examples of health and competency, instead of disease and want.
Attention | Disease | Health | Order | Rule | Wisdom | Happiness |