This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Raimon Panikkar, fully Raimon Panikkar-Alemany
Without purity of heart, not only can one not “see” God, but it is equally impossible to have any idea of what is involved in doing so. Without the silence of the intellect and the will, without the silence of the senses, without the openness of what some call “the third eye” (spoken of not only by Tibetans but also by the disciples of Richard of Saint Victor), it is not possible to approach the sphere in which the word God can have a meaning. According to Richard of Saint Victor, there exist three eyes: the occulus carnis, the occulus rationis, and the occulus fidei (the eye of the body, the eye of reason, and the eye of faith). The “third eye” is the organ of the faculty that distinguishes us from other living beings by giving us access to a reality that transcends, without denying, that which captures the intelligence and the senses.
Giving | God | Intelligence | Openness | Purity | Reality | Silence | God | Intellect |
Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Two friends went into an orchard. One of them possessing much worldly wisdom, immediately began to count the mango trees there and the number of mangoes each tree bore, and to estimate what might be the approximate value of the whole orchard. His companion went to the owner, made friends with him, and then, quietly going into a tree, began at his host's desire to pluck the fruits and eat them. Whom do you consider to be the wiser of the two? Eat mangoes. It will satisfy your hunger. What is the good of counting the trees and leaves and making calculations? The vain man of intellect busies himself with finding out the why and wherefore of creation, while the humble man of wisdom makes friends with the Creator and enjoys His gift of supreme bliss.
Desire | Good | Man | Will | Wisdom | Friends | Intellect | Value |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
The vain man of intellect busies himself with finding out the why and wherefore of creation, while the humble man of wisdom makes friends with the Creator and enjoys His gift of supreme bliss.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: It's gonna go wrong. Or She's going to hurt me. Or,I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . . Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.
Memory | Perception | Rule | Following | Intellect |
Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality--one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. Finally, it is of such universal use that it can daily be seen at work and admired alike by simple or complex minds. Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.
Excellence | Intelligence | Looks | Meaning | Mind | Thought | Will | Work | Excellence | Intellect | Thought |
Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke
As has been either said or implied already, in order that a man may enter into Cosmic Consciousness, he must belong (so to speak) to the top layer of the world of Self Consciousness. Not that he need have an extraordinary intellect (this faculty is rated, usually far above its real value and does not seem nearly so important, from this point of view, as do some others) though he must not be deficient in this respect, either. He must have a good physique, good health, but above all he must have an exalted moral nature, strong sympathies, a warm heart, courage, strong and earnest religious feeling. All these being granted, and the man having reached the age necessary to bring him to the top of the self conscious mental stratum, some day he enters Cosmic Consciousness. What is his experience? Details must be given with diffidence, as they are only known to the writer in a few cases, and doubtless the phenomena are varied and diverse. What is said here, however, may be depended on as far as it goes. It is true of certain cases, and certainly touches upon the full truth in certain other cases, so that it may be looked upon as being provisionally correct.
Age | Day | Good | Man | Need | Order | Phenomena | Self | Truth | World | Intellect | Value |
Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens. Is it a sign of superior intellect to read anything and everything unmoved, in a grey, unfeeling Limbo?
Who born so poor, Of intellect so mean, as not to know What seem'd the best; and knowing not to do? As not to know what God and conscience bade, And what they bade not able to obey?'
Conscience | God | Knowing | God | Intellect |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Thou art the God of Gods, and the Lord of Lords, Ruler of beings celestial and terrestrial, For all creatures are Thy witnesses And by the glory of this Thy name, every creature is bound to Thy service. Thou art God, and all things formed are Thy servants and worshippers. Yet is not Thy glory diminished by reason of those that worship aught beside Thee, For the yearning of them all is to draw nigh Thee, But they are like the blind, Setting their faces forward on the King’s highway, Yet still wandering from the path. One sinketh into the well of a pit And another falleth into a snare, But all imagine they have reached their desire, Albeit they have suffered in vain. But Thy servants are as those walking clear-eyed in the straight path, Turning neither to the right nor the left Till they come to the court of the King’s palace. Thou art God, by Thy Godhead sustaining all that hath been formed, And upholding in Thy Unity all creatures. Thou art God, and there is no distinction ’twixt Thy Godhead and Thy Unity, Thy pre-existence and Thy existence, For ’tis all one mystery. And although the name of each be different, "Yet they are all proceeding to one place."
Art | Eternal | Light | Lord | Sin | World | Art | Intellect |
Wealth is not of necessity a curse, nor poverty a blessing.—Wholesome and easy abundance is better than either extreme; better for our manhood that we have enough for daily comfort; enough for culture, for hospitality, for Christian charity.—More than this may or may not be a blessing.—Certainly it can be a blessing only by being accepted as a trust.
Pleasure is far sweeter as a recreation than a business.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The intelligent want self-control; children want candy.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
People of the world don't look at themselves, and so they blame one another.
Intelligence | Lust | Intellect |
S.G. Tallentyre, nom de plume for Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals.
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
All these sensory means and exercises of the faculties must be left behind and in silence so that God Himself may affect the divine union of the soul. As a result one has to follow this method of disencumbering, emptying, and depriving the faculties of their natural rights and operations to make room for the inflow and illumination of the supernatural. If a person does not turn his eyes from his natural capacity, he will not attain to so lofty a communication; rather he will hinder it. If it is true that the soul must journey by knowing God through what He is not, rather than through what He is, it must journey, insofar as possible, by way of the denial and rejection of natural and supernatural apprehensions. This is our task now with the memory. We must draw it away from its natural props and capacities and raise it above itself (above all distinct knowledge and apprehensible possession) to supreme hope in the incomprehensible God. The annihilation of the memory in regard to all forms (including the five senses) is an absolute requirement for union with God. This union cannot be wrought without a complete separation of the memory from all forms that are not God. In great forgetfulness it is absorbed in a supreme good. Once he has the habit of union he no longer experiences these lapses of memory in matters concerning his moral and natural life. All the operations of the memory and other faculties in this state are divine.
Faith | Love | Progress | Purity | Reason | Sense | Simplicity | Soul | Will | Intellect |
Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
No, he (The emperor is not a priest) isn't, because he neither stands beside the altar, and after the consecration of the bread elevates it with the words. Holy things for the holy, nor does he baptize, nor perform the rite of anointing, nor does he ordain and make bishops and presbyters and deacons; nor does he anoint churches, nor does he bear the symbols of the priesthood, the omophorion and the Gospel book, [as he bears the symbols] of imperial office, the crown and the purple.
Saint Maximus the Confessor NULL
For by plucking out self-love, which is, as they say, the beginning and mother of all evils, everything that comes from it and after it is plucked out as well. Once this is no more, absolutely no form or trace of evil can any longer subsist. All the forms of virtue are introduced, fulfilling the power of love, which gather together what has been separated, once again fashioning the human being in accordance with a single meaning and mode. It levels off and makes equal any inequality or difference inclination in anything, or rather binds it to that praiseworthy inequality, by which each is so drawn to his neighbor in preference to himself and so honors him before himself, that he is eager to spurn any obstacle in his desire to excel. And for this reason each one willingly frees himself from himself, by separating himself from any thoughts or properties to which he is privately inclined, and is gathered to the one singleness and sameness, in accordance with which nothing is in anyway separated from what is common to all, so that each is in each, and all in all, or rather in God and in others, and they are radiantly established as one, having the one logos of being in themselves, utterly single in nature and inclination. And in this God is understood: in him they are all beheld together and they are bound together and raised to him, as the source and maker. The logos of being of all beings by nature preserves itself pure and inviolate for our attention, who, with conscious zeal through the virtues and the toils that accompany them, have been purified from the passions that rebel against it.
Contemplation | Failure | Future | Grace | Hope | Ignorance | Law | Mystery | Principles | Scripture | Soul | Wisdom | Failure | Contemplation | Intellect |