This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties. It is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcomes pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Begin in prayer; continue in prayer; end in prayer; All the help that we have in the conversation of the children comes from God. We cannot convert their souls, but God can by the influence of His Spirit. When we study our lessons, let us go first for illumination to God, that we may so impress it on the minds and hearts of those we are teaching, that they may bring forth fruit for salvation; that they may see our earnestness." -
"The Divine Mind communicates with the human mind through the imagination. A prayer, therefore, should be offered in the form of a mental image. Man must visualize the thing he desires, he must use his imaginative powers to form his petition in terms clearly outlined in his own mind. The profound concentration of attention and thought which this form of prayer requires fills also the heart with deep earnestness and devotion. Man must pray whole-heartedly as well as wholemindedly; he must believe in his heart that his well-being depends completely upon his prayer." - Morris Lichtenstein
"Without earnestness no man is ever great or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant; entertaining, popular; but he will want weight." - Peter Bayne
"Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties. It is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcome pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; make light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them." - John Christian Bovee
"The Divine Mind communicates with the human mind through the imagination. A prayer, therefore, should be offered in the form of a mental image. Man must visualize the thing he desires, he must use his imaginative powers to form his petition in terms clearly outlined in his own mind. The profound concentration of attention and thought which this form of prayer requires fills also the heart with deep earnestness and devotion. Man must pray whole-heartedly as well as wholemindedly; he must believe in his heart that his well-being depends completely upon his prayer." - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein
"The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life." - Theodore Parker
"It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that ensures your growth." -
"One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason." - Blaise Pascal
"There is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent and sincere earnestness." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
"We should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves; and we should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God." - Charles Caleb Colton
"We should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves." - Charles Caleb Colton
"To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Five things constitute perfect virtue: gravity, magnanimity, earnestness, sincerity, kindness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Prayer is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but compunction of soul." - Hannah More
"We should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God; we should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves." - James Bryant Conant
"We should act with as much energy as those who expect everything from themselves; and we should pray with as much earnestness as those who expect everything from God." - James Bryant Conant
"Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Earnestness alone makes life eternity." - Thomas Carlyle
"Enthusiasm is the intoxication of earnestness." - Alphonse de Lamartine, fully Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine
"We have lost sensitivity to truth and purity of heart in the wasteland of opportunism… Continuity, permanence, intimacy, authenticity, earnestness are its attributes. For the soul, home is where the prayer is." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence " - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"With sincerity and earnestness one can realize God through all religions. The Vaishnavas will realize God, and so will the Saktas, the Vedantists and the Brahmos. The Mussalmans and the Christians will realize him too. All will certainly realize God if they are earnest and sincere." - Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
"There are, I should say, four elements in a redemptive community. It is personal, with things happening between people as well as to and in them individually; it is compassionate, always eager to help, observant but non-judgmental toward others, breathing out hope and concern; it is creative, with imagination about each one in the group and its work as a whole, watching for authentic new vision coming from any of them; and it is expectant, always seeking to offer to God open and believing hearts and minds through which He can work out His will, either in the sometimes startling miracles He gives or in steady purpose through long stretches where there is no special opening. It may fairly be said that unless one enmeshes himself in this redemptive fellowship of the church, he lessens his chances of steady growth and effectiveness." - Sam Shoemaker, fully Samuel "Sam" Moor Shoemaker, III
"If then we have angels, let us be sober, as though we were in the presence of tutors; for there is a demon present also." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
"A man should be careful never to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage; people may be amused, band laugh at the time, but they; will be remembered, and brought up against him upon some subsequent occasion." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"For general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to; though if he has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. What we read with inclination makes a stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention, so there is but half to be employed on what we read. If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The facts of man's history do not fully represent the faculties of his nature as the history of matter represents the qualities of matter. Man, though finite, is indefinitely progressive, continually unfolding the qualities of his nature; his history, therefore, is not the whole book of man, but only the portion thereof which has been opened and publicly read. So the history of man never completely represents his nature; and a law derived merely from the facts of observation by no means describes the normal rule of action which belongs to his nature. The laws of matter are known to us because they are kept; there the ideal and actual are the same; but man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than what he has come up to, — an ideal of nature which shames his actual of history. Observation and reflection only give us the actual of morals; conscience, by gradual and successive intuition, presents us the ideal of morals." - Theodore Parker
"Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, that love of yours was mine, my Dear! That love of yours was mine." - Thomas Carlyle
"The sublime rejects mean, low, or trivial expressions; but it is equally an enemy to such as are turgid." - Hugh Blair
"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom." - William James
"Now since our eternal state is as certainly ours, as our present state; since we are as certainly to live forever, as we now live at all; it is plain, that we cannot judge of the value of any particular time, as to us, but by comparing it to that eternal duration, for which we are created." - William Law
"If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings." - Albert Einstein
"There is granted to everyone after death the opportunity of amending his life, if it is at all possible." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg