This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God’s heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.
Day | Death | Difficulty | God | Heart | Heaven | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Taste | Wrong |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you and which the world does not need – this life is hell.
Despise | Heaven | Hell | Life | Life | Need | Work | World |
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: words, without thoughts, never to heaven go!
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Earth | Heaven | Philosophy |
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
The mind by passion driven from its firm hold, becomes a feather to each wind that blows.
Our sages have taught, "Whoever gets angry, it is as if he worshipped idols" (Zohar I, 27b). The reason for this is... because at the time of his anger, his faith has left him. For were he to believe that what happened to him was G d’s doing, he would not be angry at all. For although it is a person possessed of free choice that is cursing him, or striking him, or causing damage to his property -- and is accountable according to the laws of man and the laws of heaven for his evil choice -- nevertheless, as regards the person harmed, this [incident] was already decreed in heaven and “G d has many agents” [to carry out the decree].
Choice | Evil | Faith | Free choice | Heaven | Man | Property | Reason | Time |
It is written: "Forever, O G‑d, Your word stands firm in the heavens" (Psalms 119:89). Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, of blessed memory, explained the verse thus: Your word which you uttered, "Let there be a firmament..." (Genesis 1:6), these very words and letters stand firmly forever within the firmament of heaven and are forever clothed within the heavens to give them life and existence... And so it is with all created things, down to the most corporeal and inanimate of substances. If the letters of the "ten utterances" by which the world was created during the six days of creation were to depart from it for but an instant, G‑d forbid, it would revert to absolute nothingness.
All religions must be tolerated... for every man must get to heaven in his own way.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them. He would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer things to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little less privileged than he.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.
Gossip … has caused infinitely more sorrow in life than murder. It is drunkenness of the tongue; it is assassination of reputations. It runs the cowardly gamut from mere ignorant, impertinent intrusion into the lives of others to malicious slander ... He who listens to this crime of respectability without protest is as evil as he who speaks. One strong, manly voice of protest, of appeal to justice, of calling halt in the name of charity—could fumigate a room from gossip as a clear, sharp winter wind kills a pestilence.
Crime | Evil | Life | Life | Protest | Slander | Sorrow | Slander | Gossip |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
To love another better than one’s self is to begin heaven here. The greatest lesson of all is that the Father’s mansions are within one’s own breast. Heaven is here; the world of hope, anticipation, feeling, is all here. We have it here first, if we have it at all.