This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.
Experience | God | Hunger | Knowledge | Nothing | Prayer | Will | God |
How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus? How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?
Knowledge | Think | Understand |
A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions (in Pascal's sense) is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.
Destiny | Ideas | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Reality | Thought | Thought |
Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time... He is everywhere, He is in everything, and we cannot be without Him.
God | Heart | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Object | Truth | God |
The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.
Death | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Pain | Preference | Suffering | World |
Could the peaceable principle of the Quakers be universally established, arms and the art of war would be wholly extirpated: But we live not in a world of angels...I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank Heaven He has put it in my power.
The appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the [subjectivist] challenge itself, so this is really a way of showing that the challenge is unintelligible. The charge of begging the question implies that there is an alternative–namely, to examine the reasons for and against the claim being challenged while suspending judgment about it. For the case of reasoning itself, however, no such alternative is available, since any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reasons against it, and these must be rationally assessed. The use of reason in the response is not a gratuitous importation by the defender: It is demanded by the character of the objections offered by the challenger.
Choice | Death | Knowledge | Little | Nothing | People | Will |
This, indeed, has always been the fate of the few that have professed skepticism, that, when they have done what they can to discredit their senses, they find themselves, after all, under a necessity of trusting to them. Mr. Hume has been so candid as to acknowledge this; and it is no less true of those who have shewn the same candor; for I never heard that any skeptic runs his head against a post, or stepped into a kennel, because he did not believe his eyes.
At proper time, appropriate work must be done.
To accept what you are is to be content, and contentment is the greatest wealth.
Joy | Knowledge | Pain | Personality | Teach |
There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.
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 |
Eventually the human soul will come seeking its other half which is truly G‑d Himself, and find his own soul and his G‑d hiding there within the trail of broken pieces. Picking up the scattered shards, he discovers himself in the embrace of a loving G‑d who waited patiently in exile for His precious child to return. For even the hiddenness is G‑d.
When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. ‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies.’ ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.’ ‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leapèd and shoutèd and laugh’d And all the hills echoèd.
Age | Doubt | Envy | Eternity | God | Gold | Good | Grave | Grief | Heaven | Hell | Innocence | Joy | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Little | Passion | Philosophy | Public | Revenge | Right | Soul | Teach | Truth | Woe | Woman | Words | World | Worth | God | Child | Old |
The long-range transformation may be characterized perhaps most dramatically thus. There was a time when “I believe” as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard as meaning: “Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty.” A statement about a person’s believing has now come to mean, rather, something of this sort: “Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so-and-so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind.”
Correctness | Ideas | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Mind | Neutrality | Thought | Thought |
God having, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life,did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer.
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
When a player succeeds in forgetting himself and really acts out his assumed role, remarkable changes in his game often takes place.
Attention | Discovery | Experience | Feelings | Knowledge | Discovery | Instruction |
I find the religious diversity of the world almost bewilderingly complex. The more I study, the more variegated I find the religious scene to be. I have no reason to urge a thesis of unity among 'the religions of the world'. As a matter of fact, I do not find unity even within one so-called 'religion', let alone among all.... It is not the case that all religions are the same. The historian notes that not even one religion is the same, century after century, or from one country to another, or from village to city.... I repeat: it is not the case that all religions are the same. Moreover, if a philosopher asks (anhistorically) what they all have in common, he or she either finds the answer to be 'nothing', or finds that they all have in common something so much less than each has separately as to distort or to evacuate the individual richness and depth and sometimes grotesqueness of actual religious life.
Dedication | Good | Knowledge | Means | Pleasure | Research | Rule | Sense | Society | Truth | Society | Think |
Eternity appear’d above them as One Man, enfolded In Luvah’s robes of blood, and bearing all his afflictions: As the sun shines down on the misty earth, such was the Vision. But purple Night, and crimson Morning, and golden Day, descending Thro’ the clear changing atmosphere, display’d green fields among The varying clouds, like Paradises stretch’d in the expanse, With towns, and villages, and temples, tents, sheep-folds and pastures, Where dwell the children of the Elemental worlds in harmony.
Body | Genius | Knowing | Knowledge | Man | Men | Method | Nations | Nature | Philosophy | Spirit |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true.
Change | Experience | Force | History | Knowledge | Mathematics | Science | Truth |