This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I look upon the world as my fatherland... I look upon true patriotism as the brotherhood of man and the service of all to all.
Brotherhood | Character | Man | Patriotism | Service | World |
Experience, it is said, makes a man wise. that is very silly talk. If there were nothing beyond experience it would simply drive him mad.
Character | Experience | Man | Nothing | Wise |
The God-relationship determines what love is between man and man, then love is kept from pausing in any self-deception or illusion, while certainly the demand for self-abnegation and sacrifice is again made more infinite. The love which does not lead to God, the love which does not have this as its sole goal, to lead the lovers to love God, stops at the purely human judgment as to what love and what love’s sacrifice and submission are; it stops and thereby escapes the possibility of the last and most terrifying horror of the collision: that in the love relationship there are infinite differences in the idea of what love is.
Character | God | Illusion | Judgment | Love | Man | Relationship | Sacrifice | Self | Self-deception | Submission |
No guilty man is ever acquitted at the bar of his own conscience.
Character | Conscience | Man | Guilty |
Poverty persuades a man to do and suffer everything that he may escape from it.
A man could not have anything upon his conscience if God did not exist, for the relationship between the individual and God, the God-relationship, is the conscience, and that is why it is so terrible to have even the least thing upon one’s conscience, because one is immediately conscious of the infinite weight of God.
Character | Conscience | God | Individual | Man | Relationship | God |
No man can force the harp of his own individuality into the people’s heart; but every man may play upon the chords of the people’s heart, who draws his inspiration from the people’s instinct.
Character | Force | Heart | Individuality | Inspiration | Instinct | Man | People | Play |
You are rich, though you do not know it. You have wells of kindness within your heart. At times man will bless you more for a smile, a kindly glance, a gesture of forgiveness, than for treasures of gold.
Character | Forgiveness | Gold | Heart | Kindness | Man | Smile | Will |
The experience of another is not valid for the understanding of reality. But the organized religions throughout the world are based on the experience of another and, therefore, are not liberating man but only binding him to a particular pattern that sets man against man. Each one of us has to start anew, afresh, for what we are, the world is. The world is not different from you and me. This little world of our problems, extended, becomes the world and the problems of the world.
Character | Experience | Little | Man | Problems | Reality | Understanding | World |
There is a sort of natural instinct of human dignity in the heart of man which steels his very nerves not to bend beneath the heavy blows of a great adversity.