This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has remind us (Moral Men - Immoral Society), groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
The uniqueness of the inner soul, in its own authenticity – this is the highest expression of the seed of divine light, the light planted for the righteous, from which will bud and blossom the fruit of the tree of life.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
I believe in immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds... I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.
Death | Deeds | Faith | Heart | Immortality | Joy | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Magic | Motives | Soul |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
The chaff from winnowing will blind a man’s eyes so that he cannot tell the points of the compass. Mosquitoes will keep a man awake all night with their biting. And just in the same way this talk of charity and duty to one’s neighbor drives me nearly crazy. Sir! strive to keep the world to its own simplicity. And as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so let virtue establish itself. Wherefore such undue energy, as though searching for a fugitive with a big drum?
Charity | Duty | Energy | Man | Simplicity | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World |
He that takes away reason, to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both.
Light | Reason | Revelation |
James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
Nahuatl Wise Men including Nezahualcoyotl NULL
One day we must go, one night we will descend into the region of mystery. Here, we only come to know ourselves; only in passing are we here on earth. In peace and pleasure let us spend our lives; come let us enjoy ourselves. Let not the angry do so; the earth is vast indeed! Would that one lived forever; would that one were not to die!
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Eternity is another word for unity. In it, past and future are not apart; here is everywhere, and now goes on forever. The opposite of eternity is diffusion not time. Eternity does not begin when time is at its end. Time is eternity broken into space, like a ray of light refracted in the water… unity is a task, not a condition. The world lies in strife, in discord, in divergence. Unity is beyond not within reality.
Eternity | Future | Light | Past | Reality | Space | Time | Unity | World |
The relation of existence to time is characterized by two polar elements: temporality and uninterruptedness. Existence is evanescent and always faces the prospect of annihilation, of being thrown out of the stream of time, yet it also exhibits some degree of permanence as the continuous duration in time. Without an element of constancy there could be no permanence within temporality and no knowledge of reality, since our categories of reason are “mirrors, in which the things are reflected in the light of their constancy… Things perish within time, while time itself is everlasting… The present moment is not a terminal but a signal of beginning, an act of creation.
Beginning | Constancy | Existence | Knowledge | Light | Present | Reality | Reason | Time |
A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it comes from beyond. O thou who art the kernel of Existence, the disagreement between Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew depends on the standpoint.
Art | Disagreement | Existence | Light | Art |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
A man following Christ’s teaching is like a man carrying a lantern before him at the end of a pole. The light is ever before him, and ever impels him to follow it, by continually lighting up fresh ground and attracting him onward.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, but he beholds the light, and whence it flows, he sees it in his joy; the youth, who daily farther from the east must travel, still is Nature’s priest, and by the vision splendid is on his way attended; at length the man perceives it die away, and fade into the light of common day.
Day | Heaven | Infancy | Joy | Light | Man | Nature | Prison | Vision | Youth |