This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
God has not be earned. He has only to be sought. Meditation is the only way. Beliefs, reading books — these cannot give you realization. ... Meditation brings proof of the existence of God. ... The more you meditate the more you will feel the endless joy of God.
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language; rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected. The understanding attained by critical reading of a text implies perceiving the relationship between text and context.
Knowledge | Language | Reading | Reality | Relationship | Understanding |
The traditional religious rituals are important; it makes us partners in the experience of others Assembly of worship and prayer. But we must never forget the experience of spiritual experience of love is the first process and not in the rules of love… Traditional religions’ practices are important. They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer, but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love, and with love, there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior, others may turn to reading books of advice from experts on relationships but this is all folly. The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters… We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation… Tragedy always brings about radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss.
Advice | Books | Change | Control | Emotions | Experience | Heart | Love | Reading | Tragedy | Worship |
Petrarch, anglicized from Italian name Francesco Petrarca NULL
Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commenced to rest and relax I should cease to live. I know my own powers. I am not fitted for other kinds of work, but my reading and writing, which you would have me discontinue, are easy tasks, nay, they are a delightful rest, and relieve the burden of heavier anxieties. There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us or wound us while they charm, but the pen we take up rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away — sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small a cost of effort or anxiety.
Cost | Effort | Life | Life | Lord | Power | Reading | Rest | Truth | Work | Vicissitudes |
Pierre Trudeau, aka Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fully Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau
I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.
Government | Reading | Witness | Government |
Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.
Novels |
I think there are cultural reasons why we are suspicious of anything that has to do with beauty. One is that many of us believe that beauty requires culture. You have to have read many books and you have got to have studied in order to understand and enjoy say music or a beautiful painting. And that is absolutely not true. Reading may help us deepen our appreciation of beauty, but beauty is for everyone. It’s true that we have a possibility of increasing our gamut of beauty, increasing our aesthetic intelligence, our ability to appreciate beauty so that we don’t appreciate it only in great works of art or only in nature or only in music, but we appreciate it also in everyday life. Some people appreciate beauty even in things that are very banal and obvious. They have a greater aesthetic intelligence in my opinion. And of course there is an enormous world of inner beauty. I think we can learn to appreciate not only outer beauty, but the inner beauty of people. The beauty of honesty, the beauty of kindness, the beauty of intelligence. Appreciating beauty that is not immediately evident may take some time, but once we tune into it it’s there to stay.
Ability | Aesthetic | Appreciation | Art | Beauty | Books | Intelligence | Music | Nature | Order | People | Reading | World | Appreciation | Art | Beauty | Learn | Think | Understand |
Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, aka Pinchas or Pinchos of Koretz
R’ Pinchas said: “‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is One’ (Deuteronomy 6:4). The term echad [one] in the reading of the Shema, which proclaims the unity of G-d, [requires us to] state that there is nothing in the whole world other than the Holy One, Who fills the whole earth with His glory. The principal intention [of the commandment to recite the Shema] is that we should consider ourselves null and void, and [understand] that there is nothing to us but the soul within us, which is part of G-d above. Hence there is nothing in the whole world except the One G-d. Our principal thought when reciting the word echad should be that the whole earth is full of His glory and there is nothing [in the universe] devoid of Him”.
Earth | Glory | Intention | Lord | Nothing | Reading | Soul | Thought | Unity | World | Thought |
Pope Pius X, aka Saint Pope Pius X and Pope of the Eucharist, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto NULL
Henceforth it will be the task of this Sacred Congregation not only to examine carefully the books denounced to it, to prohibit them if necessary, and to grant permission for reading forbidden books, but also to supervise, ex officio, books that are being published, and to pass sentence on such as deserve to be prohibited.
There is one taboo that has withstood all the recent efforts at demystification: the idealization of mother love. The usual run of biographies illustrates this very clearly. In reading the biographies of famous artists, for example, one gains the impression that their lives began at puberty. Before that, we are told, they had a happy, contented, or untroubled childhood, or one that was full of deprivation or very stimulating. But what a particular childhood really was like does not seem to interest these biographers-as if the roots of a whole life were not hidden and entwined in its childhood.
Childhood | Famous | Impression | Life | Life | Mother | Reading |
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.
Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
Reading |
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.
Reading |
When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.
Books | Events | Learning | Listening | Meaning | Reading | Time |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Better than reading is hearing, and better than hearing is seeing. One understands the scriptures better by hearing them from the lips of the guru or of a holy man. Then one doesn't have to think about their non-essential part.
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Can one find God in the sacred books? By reading the scriptures one may feel at the most that God exists. But God does not reveal Himself to a man unless he himself dives deep. Only after such a plunge, after the revelation of God through His grace, is one's doubt destroyed. You. may read scriptures by the thousands and recite thousands of texts; but unless you plunge into God with yearning of heart, you will not comprehend Him. By mere scholarship you may fool man, but not God.
Doubt | God | Man | Reading | Revelation | Sacred | Will | God |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Mere reading of the scriptures is not enough. A person cannot understand the true significance of the scriptures if he is attached to the world.
Reading | Understand |