This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Let us keep our silent sanctuaries for in them the eternal perspectives are preserved." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour
"Peace is not merely a vacuum left by the ending of wars. It is the creation of two eternal principles, justice and freedom." - James T. Shotwell
"We believe in a life continuum, and eternal life. Each incarnation or lifetime on earth is 'just a day in the classroom'... We believe the plane of greatest learning is the physical plane. It is up to all of us to make the most of each carnation. We believe that all there is in the universe is energy... and all energy forms, from subatomic particles to stars, are in a constant state of change and transformation... that interpreting energy frequencies on sensory bands creates the reality in which each life-form lives." - Richard and Greta Smolowe
"God and all His attributes are eternal, that is to say, each one of His attributes expresses existence. The same attributes of God, therefore, which manifest the eternal essence of God, at the same time manifest His eternal existence; that is to say, the very same thing which constitutes the essence of God constitutes at the same time His existence, and therefore His existence and His essence are one and the same thing." -
"It is just because no event can be past with respect to an eternal entity that an eternal entity cannot alter a past event. An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events, but it can affect events only as they are actually occurring." - Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann
"Religion is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite; it is the true center of gravity of our life. This we can attain during our childhood by daily living in a place where the truth of the spiritual world is not obscured by a crowd of necessities assuming artificial importance; where life is simple, surrounded by fullness of leisure, by ample space and pure air and profound peace of nature; and where men live with a perfect faith in the eternal life before them." -
"The object of education is to give man the unity of truth... I believe in a spiritual world - not as anything separate from this world - but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." -
"If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable." - Lyall Watson
"Each of us inevitable, each of us limitless - each of us with his or her right upon the earth, each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, each of us here as divinely as any is here." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"We have in dreams no true perception of time - a strange property of mind ! - for if such be also its property when entered into the eternal disembodied state, time will appear to us eternity! The relations of space as well as of time are also annihilated, so that while almost an eternity is compressed into a moment, infinite space is traversed more swiftly than by real thought." - Hubbard Winslow
"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do so for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time." -
"Blessings be with them, and eternal praise who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares, the poets, who on earth have made us heirs of truth and pure delight, by heavenly lays." - William Wordsworth
"Procrastination is the thief of time: year after year it steals, till all are fled, and to the mercies of a moment leaves the vast concerns of an eternal scene." - Edward Young
"The eternal secret of all great art, yes of every mortal achievement... Concentration." - Stefan Zweig
"No matter! – so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us – to give happiness, and to do good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"Suffering was a curse from which man fled, not it becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange initiation into happiness." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"The eternal truth is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of things - life in God." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"Human law has the true nature of law only in so far as it corresponds to the right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. In so far as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?" - Phil Batchelor
"To me it seems as if when god conceived the world, that was poetry; He formed it, and that was sculpture; He colored it, and that was painting; He peopled it with living things, and that was the grand, divine eternal Drama." - David Belasco
"There exists in that Eternal World the permanent realities of every thing, which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature." - William Blake
"That we may arrive at an understanding of the First Principle, which is most spiritual and eternal and above us, we ought to proceed through the traces which are corporeal and outside us; and this it to be led into the way of God. We ought next to enter into our minds, which are the eternal image of God, spiritual and internal; and this is to walk in the truth of God. We ought finally to pass over into that which is eternal, most spiritual, and above us, looking to the First Principle; and this is to rejoice in the knowledge of God and in the reverence of His majesty." - Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure
"This universe of things is a ladder whereby we may ascend to God, since among these things are God’s footprints, some God’s image, some corporeal, some spiritual, some temporal, some eternal." - Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure
"God is felt in us as a divine restlessness which spurs us on so long as we truly live. When it deserts us, we are really dead. Be productive and be productive for the common good – that is the eternal commandment." - John Elof Boodin
"There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence." - John Elof Boodin
"Remember the eternal law: you must give, if you want to get." - Subhas Chandra Bose, aka Netaji
"The search for God is a search for the purpose of life and for an unfailing source of eternal value." - Edgar Sheffield Brightman
"There is an absolute truth about everything; it lies behind all blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, unfound certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it. It and the possession of it makes the eternal difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and at the heart of everything." - Phillips Brooks
"We may call it spirituality, enthusiasm, spontaneity, outlook, insight, - many names will do, - but what we mean by all of them is essentially the same. It is the power to see the element of eternal principles in which things live, - to see the way in which each fact and act is a true wave on the great ocean of infinity, to see all life full of the life of God, - and so to lose the sense of hardness and separateness in the things which happen and things we do." - Phillips Brooks
"All true prayer is worship – the ascription of worth to the Eternal. Without adoration, thanksgiving may become a miserliness, petition a selfish clamor, intercession a currying of special favors for our friends, and even contemplation may turn into a refined indulgence." - George Arthur Buttrick
"The world is the book where eternal Wisdom wrote its own ideas, and the living temple where, depicting its own acts and likeness, it decorated the height and the depth with living statues; so that every spirit, to guard against profanity, should read and contemplate here art and government, and each should say: “I fill the universe, seeing God in all things.” But we, souls bound to books and dead temples, copied with many mistakes from the living, place these things before such instruction. O ills, quarrels, ignorance, labors, pains, make us aware of our falling away: O let us, in God’s name, return to the original." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"If we want the perfect host to take us into his eternal home when we come to knock at his door, he has told us himself what we have to do: we must be ready to open our own door to the earthly guests that come our way." - Jean Daniélou
"It is from the very element of the eternal and the unlimited, which the materialist seeks to deny, that the true progress of the human race has sprung." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"Hatred does not cease by hatred; hated ceases only by love. This is the eternal law." - Dhammapada NULL
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." - Albert Einstein
"A passionate translation of the Sh’ma: Sh’ma: listen, or wake up. Yisroel: you who seek to understand and connect with God. Adonai: the Eternal One who has been present since the beginning of time and who expresses love and wisdom by entering our hearts and our world as Eloheynu: our God. Adonai Ekhad: this Eternal energy is the unity within and between all things." - Leonard Felder
"To face God and eternal life aright, each person must accept reality. Flight from God is the flight of fear. Acceptance of God is the acceptance of the love that involves the acceptance of self and others. It is the acceptance of life." - Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
"We have no definition of God; we have only a roadway that leads out toward God. We are convinced beyond peradventure that he who travels merely the path of electrons, atoms, molecules toward a vision of the ultimate misses it, and that he who travels the road of spiritual values – goodness, truth, beauty – finds it. The eternal and creative Power cannot be adequately approached through the metrical world alone; the innermost nature of the ultimate is revealed also in the personal world of spiritual values." -
"Truth is true because it is true – not because we make it so. Prayer does not change things for us, but it changes them by tuning us in to the eternal Truth. You have nothing to deal with but your own thoughts, and your own beliefs. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - Emmet Fox