This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradion said: If two sit together and no words of Torah are interchanged between them, theirs is the session of the scornful, as it is written (Psalm 1:1) "Nor sit in the seat of scoffers." But when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests between them, as it is written (Malachi 3:16) "Then those who revered the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord took note and listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who revered the Lord and thought on his name." Scripture speaks here of two. Whence do we learn that if even one sits and occupies himself in the Torah, the Holy One blessed be He, appoints him a reward? Because it is written (Lamentations 3:28) "to sit alone in silence when the Lord has imposed it."
Lord | Scripture | Silence | Thought | Words | Torah | Blessed | Learn | Thought |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Rabbi Akiva said: “Jesting and frivolity lead a man towards promiscuity. Tradition is a safeguarding fence around the Torah. Tithes are a fence to wealth. Vows a fence to abstinence. Silence is a fence to wisdom.”
Millions so wished in silence for means to travel more rapidly, to send intelligence more rapidly; and this brought steam and the electric telegraph.
Intelligence | Means | Silence |
Soon other questions and demands are to be answered, questions ever going out in silence from multitudes; and, in answering them, in at first attempting to carry out and prove the answers and the means shown to accomplish or realize many things deemed impossible or visionary, there will be mistake and stupidity, and blunder and silliness, and breakdowns and failures, and consequent ridicule; just as there were ten smashes on railways, and ten bursted boilers in the earlier era of the use of steam, to one of today.
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
You should keep silence or to say something that is better than a silence.
R. H. Stoddard, fully Richard Henry Stoddard
Let me silent be; For silence is the speech of love, The music of the spheres above. Men can be great when great occasions call: In little duties women find their spheres, The narrow cares that cluster round the hearth. Not that the heavens the little can make great, But many a man has lived an age too late.
Quiet had a roof and it had walls around it, and you could sit inside it. She had never thought of silence as a place.One of the friends, Tom Williams told her,'the place is in your heart, Louise. Everything else is just clutter.
Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.
Raimon Panikkar, fully Raimon Panikkar-Alemany
Without purity of heart, not only can one not “see” God, but it is equally impossible to have any idea of what is involved in doing so. Without the silence of the intellect and the will, without the silence of the senses, without the openness of what some call “the third eye” (spoken of not only by Tibetans but also by the disciples of Richard of Saint Victor), it is not possible to approach the sphere in which the word God can have a meaning. According to Richard of Saint Victor, there exist three eyes: the occulus carnis, the occulus rationis, and the occulus fidei (the eye of the body, the eye of reason, and the eye of faith). The “third eye” is the organ of the faculty that distinguishes us from other living beings by giving us access to a reality that transcends, without denying, that which captures the intelligence and the senses.
Giving | God | Intelligence | Openness | Purity | Reality | Silence | God | Intellect |
If a word spoken in its time is worth one piece of money, silence in its time is worth two.
Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.
Acceptance | Criticism | Important | Power | Silence | Strength |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I have a notion that, at big fires, a moment of extreme suspense can sometimes occur, when the jets of water slacken off, the firemen no longer climb, no one moves a muscle. Without a sound, a high black wall of masonry cants over up above, the fire blazing behind it, and, without a sound, leans, about to topple. Everyone stands waiting, shoulders tensed, faces drawn in around their eyes, for the terrible crash. That is how the silence is here.
What does it mean to a physician to practice medicine without mystery? When I was a medical student, my school had a large, black-tie retirement dinner for a very famous man on the medical faculty, whose scientific contribution had earned him a Nobel prize. He was 80 years old. The entire school gathered to honor him, and famous medical people came from all over the world. This doctor gave a wonderful speech describing the progress of scientific knowledge during the 50 years that he had been a physician. We gave him a standing ovation. After we sat down he remained at the podium. There was a brief silence and then he said, There's something else important that I want to say. And I especially want to tell the students. I have been a physician for 50 years and I don't know anything more about life now than I did at the beginning. I am no wiser. It slipped through my fingers. We were stunned into silence. I remember thinking that perhaps he was senile. In retrospect, it was a very remarkable thing he did. He took an opportunity to warn us about the cage of ideas and roles and self-expectations that was closing around us, even as he spoke to us - the cage that would keep us from achieving our good purpose, which is healing. Healing is a matter of wisdom, not of scientific knowledge.
Famous | Good | Honor | Ideas | Important | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Opportunity | People | Practice | Progress | Retirement | Silence | Speech | Thinking |
Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and others. That which is hidden. In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
Attention | Culture | Heart | Listening | Opportunity | People | Silence | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | Words |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Feelings for whom? O you the transformation of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out,-- holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice surging forth with all my earthly feelings? They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings and whitely fly in circles round your face. My soul, dressed in silence, rises up and stands alone before you: can't you see? Don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe upon your vision as upon a tree? If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream. But when you want to wake, I am your wish, and I grow strong with all magnificence and turn myself into a star's vast silence above the strange and distant city, Time.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Soul in the room where I am, here I am, Entrungene, staggering. Wag ego then? I'll throw myself? were eligible for a lot where I urged. Now that even the slightest power of accomplishing it completely, in silence before the competition -: Wag ego then? Throw myself Although I suffered from self-conscious body, nights, so I befriended him, the earthen, with infinity, sobbing overflowed, that I raised . his austere heart But now, whom ego, show me your soul I? Who? is surprised Suddenly I want to be the eternal, not adhering to the contrary, no longer comforter, feeling with nothing but heaven. Hardly a secret, because in the open all the secrets of a, an anxious O go by how the big hugs. What is embraced me, which I continue to give me, awkward Embracing? Or I forgot, and counting? forgot the finite turmoil that heavy lovers? Stalin ', rush up and Kann?
Competition | Ego | Heart | Nothing | Power | Silence | Soul | Turmoil |