This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
It is a man listening through a tornado for the Still Small Voice… a soul standing in awe before the mystery of the Universe… a hungry heart seeking for love… Time flowing into Eternity… IT is a man climbing the altar stairs to God.
Awe | Eternity | God | Heart | Listening | Love | Man | Mystery | Soul | Time | Universe |
In wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills up the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance: the last is the parent of adoration.
Admiration | Ends | Ignorance | Philosophy | Wonder | Parent |
True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
People | Silence | Friendship |
Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |
Do you have the courage of your desires, or have you always considered your yearnings as idle and unproductive? Do you feel the wonder of existence, your own and that of everything? Does it truly do justice to that wonder to see it as an illusion or as a product of chance?
Chance | Courage | Existence | Illusion | Justice | Wonder | Yearnings |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
If the self-conception of novelty is the basic wonder of the universe, this eliciting of mind from the potentialities of world-stuff, and its intensification and increasing importance during evolution is the basic wonder of life.
Evolution | Life | Life | Mind | Novelty | Self | Universe | Wonder | World | Novelty |
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
Prayer is an expression of man’s inner yearning for a response in the awful silence of the universe. It is a unique process of discovery whereby the searching ego affirms itself in the very moment of self-negation, and thus discovers its own worth and justification as a dynamic factor in the life of the universe.
Discovery | Dynamic | Ego | Justification | Life | Life | Man | Prayer | Self | Silence | Unique | Universe | Worth | Discovery |
Stephen Larsen, fully H. Stephen Larsen
Inevitably we learn through changing our perspectives. Consideration of life against the background of death brings its wonder and mystery to the surface.
Consideration | Death | Life | Life | Mystery | Wonder | Learn |