This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue. For so have I heard that all the noises and prating of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, is hushed and appeased upon the instant of bringing upon them the light of a candle or torch. Every beam of reason and ray of knowledge checks the dissolutions of the tongue." - Jeremy Taylor
"Doubt is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization - the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith that springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best." - Robert James Turnbull
"Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries." - John Tyndall
"Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"Every individual existence is brought into rhythm by a pendulum to which the heart gives type and name. There is a time for expanding and a time for contraction; one provokes the other and the other calls for the return of the first... Never are we nearer the Light than when the darkness is deepest." -
"The soul, advancing ever to the source of light and all perfection, lives, adores, and reigns in cloudless knowledge, purity and bliss." - Henry Ware
"The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life." - Robert Penn Warren
"Workers need poetry more than bread. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry." - Simone Weil
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." - Edith Wharton
"A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Not from successful love alone, nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; but as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, as gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, as softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, as days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days!" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Wisdom sits alone, topmost in heaven: she is its light, its God; and in the heart of man she sits as high, though groveling minds forget her oftentimes, seeing but this world’s idols." - Nathaniel Parker Willis
"Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher." - William Wordsworth
"To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid." - Yaqui Mystic NULL
"Only mushrooms can grow in the shadow of mighty trees, but shrubs need light in order to grow. If you recognize your father is a tree, you should move away and out of his shadow." - Carl Zimmerer
"Our personal question about our life’s purpose may very well be the tip as well as the foundation of the collective iceberg – part of the much larger question of where do we go from here? If we consider these individual longings in light of systems thinking, perhaps we can see them, not as isolated, narcissistic musings, but as equivalent to the DNA of our soul, the generative driver of evolution itself." - Carol Adrienne
"I challenge my destiny, my time. I challenge the human eye. I will sneer at ridiculous rules and people. That is the end of it; I will fill my eyes with pure light, and swim in a sea of unbounded feeling." - Aisha al-Taimuriya
"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
"A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people that your heart is at home." - Gil Atkinson
"Who lives better than the one who is true to his own inner light?" - Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
"Love also sheds light on our desire for happiness. The desire for love is connected with the desire for happiness. But no one who truly loves can in good faith reduce love to the pursuit of happiness. Love is more bittersweet than that. True love, be it romantic, familial or platonic, persists through happiness and has as its subject the welfare of the persons loved, not the lover. Love, then, reflects the important role of happiness in the meaningful life, but also the shallowness of seeing happiness as all." - Julian Baggini
"Now as God is infinite and omnipresent in all places, he consequently is within the bodies of men, as well as without them... He penetrates all beings and spirits more thoroughly than the visible light at noonday doth the air." - John Bellers
"In Godmanhood human freedom unites with the divine freedom, the human image with the divine image. By inward experience and inward living of freedom the light of that Truth is attained." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light." - Hildegard Von Bingen, Blessed Hildegard of Bingen, Saint Hildegard
"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
"If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence." - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
"“Yes,” I answered you last night; “No,” this morning, sir, I say; Colors seen by candle-light will not look the same by day." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Personal growth is often the result not of doing something new, but of seeing the same things in a new light. We all have mental maps of our world that we mistake for the actual territory. By clinging on to old maps we fail to see the true lie of the land and get lost." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"If people could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"O Light divine! We need no fuller test that all is ordered well; We know enough to trust that all is best where Love and Wisdom dwell." - Christopher Cranch, fully Christopher Pearse Cranch
"We pray that we may come into this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge." - Dionysus NULL
"Our deepest mature conviction is that finite and infinite interpenetrate, as time and eternity interpenetrate, and our problems must be solved in the light of that conviction." - Lily Dougall
"The philosophical and religious West has been axial for almost 3,000 years. In the axial model, a sharp distinction was made between this world and a world beyond, and the idea arose that, although, we are in this world, we are not of this world. According to this model, human life is a journey that leads us from appearance to reality, bondage to liberation, confusion to insight, and darkness to light." - Stephen A. Erickson
"Humor is one of God’s most marvelous gifts. Humor give us smiles, laughter, and gaiety. Humor reveals the roses and hides the thorns. Humor makes our heavy burden light and smooths the rough spots in our pathways. Humor endows us with the capacity to clarify the obscure, to simplify the complex, to deflate the pompous, to chastise the arrogant, to point a moral, and to adorn a tale." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"Life becomes religious whenever we make it so: when some new light is seen, when some deeper appreciation is felt, when some larger outlook is gained, when some nobler purpose is formed, when some task is well done." - Sophia Lyon Fahs
"Faith is people’s evolved and evolving ways of experiencing self, others and world (as they construct them) as related to and affected by the ultimate conditions of existence (as they construct them) and of shaping their lives’ purposes and meaning, trusts and loyalties, in light of the character of being, value and power determining the ultimate conditions of existence (as grasped in their operative images – conscious and unconscious of them)." - James W. Fowler III
"Faith, as imagination, grasps the ultimate conditions of our existence, unifying them into a comprehensive image in light of which we shape our responses and initiatives, our actions… Faith, then, is an active mode of knowing, of composing a felt sense or image of the condition of our lives taken as a whole. It unifies our lives’ force fields." - James W. Fowler III
"Most often faith is understood as belief in certain propositional, doctrinal formulations that in some essential ands static way are supposed to “contain” truth. But if faith is relational, a pledging of trust and fidelity to another, and a way of moving into the force field of life trusting in dynamic center of value and power, then the “truth” of faith takes on a different quality. Truth is lived: it is a pattern of being in relation to others and to God. In this light, doctrines and creeds come to be seen as playing a different though still crucial role. Rather than being the repositories of truth, like treasure chests to be honored and assented to, they becomes guides for the construction of contemporary ways of seeing and being." - James W. Fowler III
"In life you don't get all the answers at once. First you must absorb and live with one simple truth. Then later you must find another truth- one that may seem to conflict with and negate all you previously learned. Then, from that confusion, emerges a higher truth- the inner light behind all you had learned before." - Tzvi Freeman
"Our prayer for others ought never to be: “God, give them the light Thou has given to me!” but: “God! Give to them all the light and truth they need for their highest development!”" - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it." - Shakti Gawain
"The most effective kind of prayer is that in which we place ourselves, in our hearts, before God, relinquishing all resistance, letting go of all secret irritation, opening ourselvse to the truth, to God’s holy mystery, saying over and over again, “I desire truth, I am ready to receive it, even this truth which causes me such concern, if it be the truth. Give me the light to know it – and to see how it bears on me.”" - Romano Guardini
"At times of distress, strengthen your heart, even if you stand at death’s door. The lamp has light before it is extinguished. The wounded lion still knows how to roar." - Samuel ha-Nagid, born Samuel ibn Naghrela or Naghrillah
"Worship is a way of living, a way of seeing the world in the light of God. To worship is to rise to a higher level of existence, to see the world from the point of view of God." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"When the light of the star which flows into my eyes as a drop of gold first pierced the darkness in space, there was not a single eye on earth looking at the sky." - Nâzım Hikmet