This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
God is always present and always working towards the life of the soul and its deliverance from captivity under flesh and blood. But this inward work of God, though never ceasing or altering, is yet always and only hindered by the activity of our own nature and faculties, by bad men through their obedience to earthly passions and by good men through their striving to be good in their own way, by their natural strength and a multiplicity of holy labors and contrivances. Both these sorts of people obstruct the work of God upon their souls. For we can cooperate with God no other way than by submitting to the work of God, and seeking, and leaving ourselves to it.
To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.
The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one has been through the experience one's self.
Belief | Change | Passion | Peace | Salvation | Sense | Will | Loss |
The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
Civilization | Day | Evil | Existence | Individual | Life | Life | Melancholy | Right |
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.
Change |
And the clouds fade above. Loved lips are thine as i tremble and hearken; bright thine eyes shine, though the leaves thy brow darken. O love, kiss me into silence, lest no word avail me, stay my head with thy bosom lest breath and life fail me! O sweet day, o rich day, made long for our love!
Forget days past, heart-broken, put all memory by No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree.
It is wonderful how near conceit is to insanity!
Beauty | Gold | Indispensable | Price | Beauty |
In the intercourse of the world people should not take words as so much genuine coin of standard metal, but merely as counters that people play with.
Hope |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?
It is easier to know mankind in general than man individually.
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables—meet it is i set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!