This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To trace in Nature's most minute design the signature and stamp of power divine… The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, to whom an atom is an ample field.
Glory | Proficiency |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
This is a miserable world, says the Sergeant. Human life, Mr. Betteredge, is a sort of target—misfortune is always firing at it, and always hitting the mark.
You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing, upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight, She hers, he his, pursuing.
Glory | Metaphysics |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The new recruits, even boys—the old men show them how to wear their accoutrements—they buckle the straps carefully; outdoors arming—indoors arming—the flash of the musket-barrels; the white tents cluster in camps—the arm'd sentries around—the sunrise cannon, and again at sunset; arm'd regiments arrive every day, pass through the city, and embark from the wharves; (How good they look, as they tramp down to the river, sweaty, with their guns on their shoulders! How I love them! how I could hug them, with their brown faces, and their clothes and knapsacks cover'd with dust!) The blood of the city up—arm'd! arm'd! the cry everywhere; the flags flung out from the steeples of churches, and from all the public buildings and stores; the tearful parting—the mother kisses her son—the son kisses his mother; (Loth is the mother to part—yet not a word does she speak to detain him.)
Glory | Metaphysics |
An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.
There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
Adversity | Comfort | Disgrace | Glory | Love | Mother | Pleasure | Sacrifice | Surrender | Tenderness | Will | World |
I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
Ends | Glory | Men | Right | Righteousness | Search | Training | Truth | Work | Think |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, 'What else are women for?
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.