This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A love that has no silence has no depth. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” There are people whose love we instinctively distrust because they are always telling us about it. And perhaps it is simply because God is love, in all the glorious fullness of that word, that we have to be still if we would know him.
Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new, sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
It is of primary importance that a certain space of time be allotted daily to meditation on eternal things. No priest can omit this without serious manifestation of negligence and without a grave loss to his soul.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
To get at the transcendent within oneself, one must break through one’s normal self. We must impose silence on our familiar self, if the spirit of God is to become manifest in us. The divine is more deeply in us than we are ourselves.
Meditation, because it is free of dogma, of historical commitments and narrow prejudices, because it is practiced for the most part silently and thereby secretly, and because it is practiced by some members of all religions - meditation is a channel for seekers of all faiths or no faith, a river into which many streams can freely flow.
Dogma | Faith | Meditation |
What is it but blasphemy when God is merely my means to an end? That takes its toll. If we turn God into a puppet of our desires (even when that happens by the pious route of prayer) then he shuts up his heaven and we find ourselves thrown back into the silence of our unredeemed life.
Blasphemy | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Means | Pious | Prayer | Silence | God |
Maitri Upanishad or Maitrayaniya Upanishad
Even as fire without fuel finds peace in its resting-place, when thoughts become silence the soul finds peace in its own source.
If we are to be saved from our futility we must recover the faculty of being still: we must make an enclave of silence within our own souls.
Silence |
Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.
If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening.