This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall - and the failure to nail current jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly.
Advice | Belief | Conscience | Faith | Freedom of conscience | Freedom | Guarantee | Inevitable | Meaning | Means | Men | Practice | Principles | Public | Right | World |
The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the Sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.
Alienation | Consciousness | Events | Experience | Meaning | Perception | Redemption | World |
For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth.
Beginning | Energy | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Sacred | Story | Universe | Crisis |
There is no greater wealth than Virtue, and no greater loss than to forget it.
Will |
Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.
Meaning |
We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
Why any man should take the law of his country rather than his own Inspiration, for the rule of his action.
Force | Meaning | Principles |
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [(candle)] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.
Abstract | Achievement | Age | Ambition | Character | Eternal | Existence | Good | Impulse | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Organic | Personality | Question | Regard | Silence | Time | Ambition |
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Control | Friend | Government | Meaning | Money | People | Truth | Government |
God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief… than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it.
Action | Contemplation | Dependence | Experience | Faith | God | Grace | Knowing | Life | Life | Meaning | Peace | Reason | Salvation | Thought | Trust | God | Contemplation | Thought |