This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men tend not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life, and differ only in the way, which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions in diverse men, and partly from the difference of the knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the effect desired.
Action | Consideration | Meditation | Precedent |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind.
Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts.
Confidence | God | Humility | Man | Meaning | Mistrust | Mystery | Perfection | Power | Present | Self | Time | Unique | Waste | World | Theoretical | God | Afraid |
Sunrise: it is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of man’s nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day, praise him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or will ever be. I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen…praising God before me. Whether or not they praised him then, for themselves, they must praise him now in me. When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.
Admiration | Secrecy |
Everything healthy, everything certain, everything holy, if we can find such things, they all need to be emphasized and articulated. For this it is necessary that there be communication between the hearts and minds of men, communication and not the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés. Communication is becoming more and more difficult, and… speech is in danger of perishing or being perverted in the amplified noise of beasts…. There is, it seems to me, every reason why we should attempt to cry out to one another and comfort one another, in so far as this may be possible, with the truth of Christ and also with the truth of humanism and reason. For faith cannot not be preserved if … man is destroyed: that is to say if his humanity is utterly debased and mechanized, while he himself remains on earth as the instrument of enormous and unidentified forces like those which press us inexorably to the brink of cataclysms.
Contemplation | God | Good | Opposition | Self | God | Contemplation |
In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with. - from No Man is an Island
The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness.
Abstract | Acceptance | Change | Despair | Existence | God | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Openness | Peace | Poverty | Search | Self | God |
The end of the world will be legal.
Dread | Fear | Ideas | Insecurity | Light | Truth | Understand |
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out...For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you?
Self |
The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons.
Death | Ego | Evidence | Giving | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | Order | Self |
There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.