This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists on being treated as the most easterly of western peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.
When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The rain-weeping and the sun burning twine together to make us grow. Keep your intelligence white-hot and your grief glistening, so your life will stay fresh. Cry easily like a little child.
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.
Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.
It is human to sin, but diabolic to persist in sin.
We will be humble as we are obedient, and as obedient as we are humble.
Trust |
How many are the pains of those who hunger for revenge! ... They have killed themselves even before they kill their enemies.
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.
Trust |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
Take God for your spouse and friend and walk with him continually, and you will not sin and will learn to love, and the things you must do will work out prosperously for you.
Ability | Attention | Attentiveness | Cause | Conduct | Contemplation | Desire | Experience | Fear | God | Knowledge | Light | Love | Means | Nothing | Peace | Pleasure | Receive | Rest | Soul | Spirit | Trials | Trust | Will | God | Contemplation |
I used to discuss with my brother ways and means of becoming martyrs, and we agreed to go together to the land of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, so that we might be beheaded there. I believe that our Lord had given us courage enough even at that tender age, if only we could have seen a way. But our parents seemed to us a very great hindrance.
O my God, what must a soul be like when it is in this state! It longs to be all one tongue with which to praise the Lord. It utters a thousand pious follies, in a continuous endeavor to please Him who thus possesses it.
Art | Comfort | Day | Desire | Effort | Friend | Good | Health | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Strength | Trust | World | Art | Think |
All things must come to the soul from its roots, from where it is planted.
Blessedness | Enough | Evil | Experience | Fear | Knowledge | Little | Lord | Love | Order | Soul | Trust | Understanding | Will | Words |
I am really much more afraid of those people who have so great a fear of the devil, than I am of the devil himself.
It seems to me that the best way will be the one that is most gentle and forbearing, which is more in conformity with the Spirit of Our Lord and more apt to win hearts.
Day | Distrust | Good | Grace | Heart | Hope | Joy | Munificence | Peace | Prayer | Reason | Receive | Regard | Soul | Strength | Time | Trust | Will | Work |
Rarely is any good done without difficulty; the devil is too subtle and the world too corrupt not to attempt to nip such a good work in the bud