This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Open Letter to the Holy Father. I take the liberty to write to You again… I can’t imagine that any other person in the world would have Your courage, Your credibility, as well as Your personal talent and God's grace to be able to speak up against an old tradition [of parents beating their children]… I am asking You again to make an appeal to all parents urging them to no longer beat their children, and to tell them that it is highly dangerous. If the Church continues to ignore the new scientific information and to stay silent about this issue in spite of the lessons of Jesus, who else can be asked to open the parents’ eyes in order to prevent the blind escalation of violence? I am sure that if my letters succeed to reach You personally You will not stay indifferent to the knowledge they are trying to pass on to you. With my most profound respect, Alice Miller.
Church | Grace | Knowledge | Liberty | Order | Parents | Tradition | Will | World | Talent | Old |
I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it.
Think |
I am worried that it seems inconsistent and unsustainable for the president to be asking for large tax cuts before we know what our continuing obligations are. I would like to see us take a deep breath, deal with Iraq… I don't believe that we really fully appreciate the cost that we may be embarking upon.
Cost |
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL
It is very good to rely on God completely. As each day begins, entrust your every movement and those of all who depend on you into God's hands, asking that everything should go according to His will.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
The recovery of the soul may depend not on having the right answers but on asking the right questions and carrying them with us for our whole lives. The medical system may need to relinquish a single-minded quest for mastery and allow for the presence of mystery. Who spoke? indeed.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
Ralph Ellison, fully Ralph Waldo Ellison
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
Contradiction | Life | Life | Time |
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about what we know pretty well. They always want to know the things we don't know.
Chance |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters.
Business | Position | Relationship | Business |
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems.
Robert Southwell, also Saint Robert Southwell
After prayer, on working days, I must go presently about some work or exercise that may be of some profit, and of all other things take heed of idleness, the mother of all vices. Towards eleven (if company and other more weighty causes will permit) I may meditate a little and call to mind how I have spent the morning, asking God grace to spend the afternoon better.
Roger Schutz, aka Frère Roger, Brother Roger of Taize, baptised Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche
In your persistent questioning, "Who do you say that I am?" You are the one who loves me into endless life. You open up the way of risk. You go ahead of me along the way of holiness, where happy are they who die of love, where the ultimate response is martyrdom. Day by day you transfigure the "no" in me into "Yes". You ask me, not for a few scraps, but for the whole of my existence. You are the one who prays in me by day and night. My stammerings are prayer: simply calling you by your name, Jesus, fills our communion to the full. You are the one who, every morning, slips on my finger the ring of the prodigal son, the ring of festival. So why have I wavered so long? You have been seeking me unwearyingly. Why did I hesitate once again, asking for time to deal with my own affairs? Once I had set my hand to the plough, why did I look back? Without realizing it, I was making myself unfit to follow you. Yet, though I had never seen you, I loved you. You kept on saying: Live the little bit of the gospel you have grasped. Proclaim my life. Light fire on the earth... You, follow me... Until one day I understood: you were asking me to commit myself to the point of no return.
Robert W. Fuller, fully Robert Works Fuller
In those places where we're most alive, we are questions, not answers. These questions change as we age. One has to listen carefully, again and again, to detect new questions, which may announce themselves in a whisper. At any age, the questions we're asking define our growing edge. So long as we've got even a single question, we're not dead. If all we have are answers, we might as well be.
Change |