This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Oswald Spengler, fully Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler
For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honored custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.
Age | Business | Correctness | Manners | Mob | Money | Nobility | Novels | People | Popularity | Restraint | Taste | Business | Old |
Practice is an effort to still the mind’s fluctuations in order to silence the consciousness.
Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed rampaging like a train. There the faint signs are left, coins of time and water, debris ,celestial ash and the irreplaceable rapture of sharing in the labour of soitude in the sand.
This withdrawal from the day's turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It is a necessity, because it tries to provide the conditions wherein we are able to yield ourselves to intuitive leadings, promptings, warnings, teachings, and counsels and also to the inspiring peace of the soul. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions.
Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Supreme happiness cannot be found in the world; but we need not run away to the jungle to seek Him (God) who is the Giver of all happiness. In this jungle of daily life, we may find Him in the cave of silence. Remember, the only man who is happy is the man who sits in the temple of silence and shuts out all storms or worries. Nothing can challenge the quietness of his soul.
Challenge | Happy | Man | Need | Nothing | Silence | Happiness |
When it seems humanly impossible to do more in a difficult situation, surrender yourself to the inner silence and thereafter wait for a sign of obvious guidance or for a renewal of inner strength.
That deep silence has a melody of its own, a sweetness unknown amid the harsh discords of the world's sounds.
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
Conversation stock being a joint and common property, everyone should take a share in it; and yet there may be societies in which silence will be our best contribution.
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
At that moment it seemed to him that time stood still and the soul of the world surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke. The language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen. The omen he had been awaiting without even knowing he was for all his life. The omen he sought to find in his sheep and in his books. In the crystals and in the silence of the desert… It was the pure language of the world. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life. And that, with no need for words she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it, than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way never learned the universal language. Because when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you. Whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love and makes a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.
Dreams | Earth | Force | Future | Important | Knowing | Language | Love | Need | Parents | Past | People | Silence | Soul | Time | Understanding | Universe | Woman | Words | World | Understand |
This conflict with the sacred is what gives us the blessing and makes us grow up… When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you… To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life… To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation… To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God… Today don't beg, don't ask, just thank God in silence for all the blessings in your life… To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world… To injure your opponent is to injure yourself.
Blessings | Day | Destiny | Experience | God | Love | Meaning | Need | Sacred | Silence | Tomorrow | God | Understand |
Every blessing ignored becomes a curse… Every day the Lord gives us - together with the sun - a moment when it is possible to change all that makes us unhappy. Every day we try to deceive ourselves that we recognize this moment, so it does not exist, that is identical today as yesterday and tomorrow will be the same. But the one who pays attention to that last day, he discovers a magical moment. It can be hidden at the time the doors unlock in the morning, in that brief silence that suddenly occurs after lunch, in a thousand and one things that look the same. This moment exists - a moment when we all dread outright star power and allow us to do miracles. Happiness is sometimes a blessing, but most often winning. The magical moment that occurs every day helps us to change, to lead us to engage in a search of their dreams… Every day the sun shines on a new world, full of what we call the monotony of the new opportunities, we do not know see the difference that distinguishes one day from its predecessor… Every second of the search is an encounter with God. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous... I've discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.
Attention | Change | Courage | Day | Dread | Lord | Power | Search | Silence | Time | Tomorrow | Will | Happiness |
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power, Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That grinds them to the dust of misery.
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed. You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social and political.
Conscience | Consecration | Contempt | Day | Law | Mankind | Opposition | Order | Reason | Right | Silence | Struggle | Will | Work | Wrong | Understand |
Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss
Against Nature's silence I use action. In the vast indifference I invent a meaning. I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them. The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
Prison is designed to silence dissent. We savage people in order to make them better citizens. We torture men and women to make them kinder and more productive. We execute human beings, in order to teach our children respect for human life.
Better | Children | Men | Order | People | Respect | Silence | Teach | Torture | Respect |
Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by, and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.
Art | Energy | Fault | Grave | Individual | Life | Life | Nothing | Silence | Solitude | Time | Worry | Art | Fault | Think |