This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A candle loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle.
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
It is better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.
J. P. Stern, fully Joseph Peter Maria Stern
Nietzsche’s approach developed eventually into a program for radically questioning all the foundations of Western thought. We are slaves to convention, he says - we base our whole lives on attitudes and ideas whose premises, if we ever get round to actually examining them, we reject. This makes ours an inauthentic way of living, a dead way of living. We must re-evaluate our values in the light of what we honestly do believe and feel.
Convention | Ideas | Light | Thought |
The cruelest insult… which can be offered to the unfortunate, is to appear to make light of their calamities.
If you want to bring a difficult relationship into the light of love, make up your mind to change your image of who both of you are.
Change | Light | Love | Mind | Relationship |
Alan Alda, born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once and a while, or the light won't come in.
Alan Alda, born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
All God’s works are silent. They are not done amid the rattle of drums and flare of trumpets. Light as it travels makes no noise, utters no sound to the ear. Creation is a silent process; nature rose under the Almighty hand without clang or clamor, or noises that distract and disturb.
We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves, and those who think through others. The latter are the rule, and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the world. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.
Light | Meaning | Rule | Sense | Thinkers | Wisdom | World | Think |
To face the inevitable is to confront something sacred. As long as anything is uncertain, the roads are open in more than one direction, and right and wrong may have many aspects. But let the issue be determined, let the die be cast, and acceptance and adjustment become our immediate duty. Until God’s will be known, we may work and wrestle and pry to carry our point, to save the day, to win the prize, spurred only the more by the uncertainty; of the result. But let the result be known, however dark and disappointing, and we should view it in the light of God’s plan to make us His evident children, and ask what we are to learn, what next we are to do.
Acceptance | Children | Day | Duty | God | Inevitable | Light | Plan | Right | Sacred | Uncertainty | Will | Work | Wrong |
Mind is no more dependent on the brain that is light on the lens through which it is focused.
Lines converging from the base of a pyramid start from infinite points of diversity. The nearer the apex the closer they come to one another until at the summit they reach the point of unity. So it is that religions at the base exhibit irreconcilable differences and conflicts. But as they approach sight of the spiritual light of their origin, they, like converging lines within a pyramid, draw close to one another until the supernal vision at the apex submerges all differences into unity.