This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are “members one of another.”
Humility |
It takes more courage than we imagine to be perfectly simple with other men. Our frankness is often spoiled by a hidden barbarity, born of fear. False sincerity has much to say, because it is afraid. True candor can afford to be silent. It does not need to face an anticipated attack. Anything it may have to defend can be defended with perfect simplicity.
Humility |
I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts.
Confidence | God | Humility | Man | Meaning | Mistrust | Mystery | Perfection | Power | Present | Self | Time | Unique | Waste | World | Theoretical | God | Afraid |
Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life.
Humility | Life | Life | Mission | Thought | Will | Thought |
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Ambition | Fidelity | Grace | Humility | Means | Need | Pleasure | Prejudice | Reality | Sin | Sincerity | Ambition |
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: In our impatience we do away with him altogether.
Beginning | Blessedness | Faith | Humility | Life | Life | Perfection | Power | Problems | Selfishness | Soul | Value |
Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing.
Acceptance | Humility | Men | Patience | Solitude | Trials | Work |
The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Awareness | Compassion | Awareness |
We have to recognize that a spirit of individualism and confusion has reduced us to an ethic of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.” This ethic, unfortunately sometimes consecrated by formulas, is nothing but the secular ethic of the affluent society, based on the false assumption that if everyone is bent on making money for himself the common good will automatically follow, due to the operation of economic laws.
Compassion | Hate | Men |
We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.
Acceptance | Charity | Grace | Humility | Love | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Compassion | Enough | Giving | Mercy | Nations | Power | Unity | Witness | World | Understand |
Adonai, source of blessings, boundless in understanding. You planned the shining of the sun and made it happen. Your creations are amazing and bring glory to Your name; sun, moon, and stars illuminate and encircle Your throne. Your heavenly servants exalt You, they constantly testify to Your glory and your holiness. And we too declare that You Adonai, be praised for your wonderful creations, for the lights that You turn on daily, for the sun and moon that reflect your glory.
Compassion | Day | Eternal | Light | Praise | Unique | World |
Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, Creator of light and darkness, who make peace and fashions all things. In mercy, You illuminate the world and those who live upon it. In Your goodness You daily renew creation. How numerous are You works, Adonai! In wisdom, You formed them all, filling the earth with Your creatures. Be praised, Adonai our God, for the excellent work of your hands, And for the lights You created; may they glorify You. Shine a new light upon Zion, that we may swiftly merit its radiance. Praised are You Adonai, Creator of heavenly lights.
Angels | Compassion | Dread | Earth | God | Honor | Light | Peace | People | Reverence | Solitude | Universe | Wisdom | Work | God | Blessed |
Victor Weisskopf, fully Victor "Viki" Frederick Weisskopf
People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder. You can only teach by creating an urge to learn.
Compassion | Existence | Knowledge |
Song of the Sinless Soul - ‘Come forth, O Vala! from the grass and from the silent dew; Rise from the dews of death, for the Eternal Man is risen!’ She rises among flowers and looks toward the eastern clearness; She walks, yea runs—her feet are wing’d—on the tops of the bending grass; Her garments rejoice in the vocal wind, and her hair glistens with dew. She answer’d thus: ‘Whose voice is this in the voice of the nourishing air, In the spirit of the morning, awaking the Soul from its grassy bed? Where dost thou dwell? for it is thee I seek, and but for thee I must have slept eternally, nor have felt the dew of thy morning. Look how the opening dawn advances with vocal harmony! Look how the beams foreshow the rising of some glorious power! The Sun is thine; he goeth forth in his majestic brightness. O thou creating voice that callest! and who shall answer thee? ‘Where dost thou flee, O Fair One! where dost thou seek thy happy place? To yonder brightness? There I haste, for sure I came from thence; Or I must have slept eternally, nor have felt the dew of morning.’ ‘Eternally thou must have slept, nor have felt the morning dew, But for yon nourishing Sun: ’tis that by which thou art arisen. The birds adore the Sun; the beasts rise up and play in his beams, And every flower and every leaf rejoices in his light. Then, O thou Fair One, sit thee down, for thou art as the grass, Thou risest in the dew of morning, and at night art folded up.’ ‘Alas! am I but as a flower? Then will I sit me down; Then will I weep; then I’ll complain, and sigh for immortality, And chide my maker, thee O Sun, that raisedst me to fall.’ So saying she sat down and wept beneath the apple-trees. ‘O! be thou blotted out, thou Sun, that raisedst me to trouble, That gavest me a heart to crave, and raisedst me, thy phantom, To feel thy heart, and see thy light, and wander here alone, Hopeless, if I am like the grass, and so shall pass away.’ ‘Rise, sluggish Soul! Why sitt’st thou here? why dost thou sit and weep? Yon Sun shall wax old and decay, but thou shalt ever flourish. The fruit shall ripen and fall down, and the flowers consume away, But thou shalt still survive. Arise! O dry thy dewy tears!’ ‘Ha! shall I still survive? Whence came that sweet and comforting voice, And whence that voice of sorrow? O Sun! thou art nothing now to me: Go on thy course rejoicing, and let us both rejoice together! I walk among His flocks and hear the bleating of His lambs. O! that I could behold His face and follow His pure feet! I walk by the footsteps of His flocks. Come hither, tender flocks! Can you converse with a pure Soul that seeketh for her Maker? You answer not: then am I set your mistress in this garden. I’ll watch you and attend your footsteps. You are not like the birds That sing and fly in the bright air; but you do lick my feet, And let me touch your woolly backs: follow me as I sing; For in my bosom a new Song arises to my Lord: ‘Rise up, O Sun! most glorious minister and light of day! Flow on, ye gentle airs, and bear the voice of my rejoicing! Wave freshly, clear waters, flowing around the tender grass; And thou, sweet-smelling ground, put forth thy life in fruit and flowers! Follow me, O my flocks, and hear me sing my rapturous song! I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds that glitter in the sun. I will call, and who shall answer me? I shall sing; who shall reply? For, from my pleasant hills, behold the living, living springs, Running among my green pastures, delighting among my trees! I am not here alone: my flocks, you are my brethren; And you birds, that sing and adorn the sky, you are my sisters. I sing, and you reply to my song; I rejoice, and you are glad. Follow me, O my flocks! we will now descend into the valley. O, how delicious are the grapes, flourishing in the sun! How clear the spring of the rock, running among the golden sand! How cool the breezes of the valley! And the arms of the branching trees Cover us from the sun: come and let us sit in the shade. My Luvah here hath plac’d me in a sweet and pleasant land, And given me fruits and pleasant waters, and warm hills and cool valleys. Here will I build myself a house, and here I’ll call on His name; Here I’ll return, when I am weary, and take my pleasant rest.’
I admit I know little of Orient art. But that is because I cannot find in it what I am looking for, or what I am talking about. To me the Oriental idea of beauty is that ‘it isn’t there’. It is in a state of nor being there. It is absent. That is why it is so good. It is the same thing I don’t like in Suprematism, Purism and non-objectivity.. ..I do like the idea that they - the pots and pans (in the old still lives) , I mean – are always in relation to man. They have no soul of their own, like they seem to have in the Orient..
Compassion | People |
I heard an Angel singing When the day was springing: ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace Is the world’s release.’ Thus he sang all day Over the new-mown hay, Till the sun went down, And haycocks lookèd brown. I heard a Devil curse Over the heath and the furze: ‘Mercy could be no more If there was nobody poor, ‘And Pity no more could be, If all were as happy as we.’ At his curse the sun went down, And the heavens gave a frown. [Down pour’d the heavy rain Over the new reap’d grain; And Misery’s increase Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.]
Abstract | Cruelty | Earth | Fear | Happy | Humility | Mercy | Mystery | Nature | Search | Cruelty |