This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms.
The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects—in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. We vilify and curse them for their damnable intransigence. They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Absence | Asceticism | Control | Fear | People | Position | Power | Question | Rancor | Research | Responsibility | Shame | Speculation | Stupidity | Thinking | Thought | Asceticism | Thought |
We must also be careful to avoid ingesting toxins in the form of violent TV programs, video games, movies, magazines, and books. When we watch that kind of violence, we water our own negative seeds, or tendencies, and eventually we will think and act out of those seeds.
We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.
Absence | Day | Fear | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Practice | War | Will | Work | Think |
By Manners, I mean not here decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of the small morals; but those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity. To which end we are to consider that the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus [utmost aim] nor summum bonum [greatest good] as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand.
But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.
In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.
Unlike Christian-Jewish dialogue, whose sour grapes have set our teeth on edge, Jewish-Muslim dialogue will be fruitful. Certainly it will serve notice on the Arabs that their Jewish “cousins” have broken out of their Western provincialism. If henceforth Jews will assign to Jewish-Muslim dialogue the importance that is its due, the Arabs, in whose nationalism religion is as important as it is in Jewish nationalism, will eventually – and perhaps sooner than cold-headed realists will dare expect – rediscover that the Jews are their brothers, descendants of Abraham’s second son.
The word of God is the creation we behold and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man.
A Poetical Epistle To Lady Austen - Dear Anna, -- Between friend and friend, Prose answers every common end; Serves, in a plain and homely way, To express the occurrence of the day; Our health, the weather, and the news, What walks we take, what books we choose, And all the floating thoughts we find Upon the surface of the mind. But when a poet takes the pen, Far more alive than other men, He feels a gentle tingling come Down to his finger and his thumb, Derived from nature's noblest part, The centre of a glowing heart: And this is what the world, who knows No flights above the pitch of prose, His more sublime vagaries slighting, Denominates an itch for writing. No wonder I, who scribble rhyme To catch the triflers of the time, And tell them truths divine and clear, Which, couched in prose, they will not hear; Who laboured hard to allure and draw The loiterers I never saw, Should feel that itching and that tingling With all my purpose intermingling, To your intrinsic merit true, When called to address myself to you. Mysterious are His ways, whose power Brings forth that unexpected hour, When minds, that never met before, Shall meet, unite, and part no more; It is the allotment of the skies, The hand of the Supremely Wise, That guides and governs our affections, And plans and orders our connections: Directs us in our distant road, And marks the bounds of our abode. Thus we were settled when you found us, Peasants and children all around us, Not dreaming of so dear a friend, Deep in the abyss of Silver-End. Thus Martha, even against her will, Perched on the top of yonder hill; And you, though you must needs prefer The fairer scenes of sweet Sancerre, Are come from distant Loire, to choose A cottage on the banks of Ouse. This page of Providence quite new, And now just opening to our view, Employs our present thoughts and pains To guess, and spell, what it contains: But day by day, and year by year, Will make the dark enigma clear; And furnish us, perhaps, at last, Like other scenes already past, With proof, that we, and our affairs, Are part of a Jehovah's cares: For God unfolds, by slow degrees, The purport of his deep decrees, Sheds every hour a clearer light In aid of our defective sight; And spreads, at length, before the soul A beautiful and perfect whole, Which busy man's inventive brain Toils to anticipate, in vain. Say, Anna, had you never grown The beauties of a rose full blown, Could you, though luminous your eye, By looking on the bud descry, Or guess, with a prophetic power, The future splendour of the flower? Just so, the Omnipotent, who turns The system of a world's concerns, From mere minutiae can educe Events of most important use, And bid a dawning sky display The blaze of a meridian day. The works of man tend, one and all, As needs they must, from great to small; And vanity absorbs at length The monuments of human strength. But who can tell how vast the plan Which this day's incident began? Too small, perhaps, the slight occasion For our dim-sighted observation; It passed unnoticed, as the bird That cleaves the yielding air unheard, And yet may prove, when understood, A harbinger of endless good. Not that I deem, or mean to call Friendship a blessing cheap or small; But merely to remark, that ours, Like some of nature's sweetest flowers, Rose from a seed of tiny size, That seemed to promise no such prize; A transient visit intervening, And made almost without a meaning, (Hardly the effect of inclination), Produced a friendship, then begun, That has cemented us in one; And placed it in our power to prove, By long fidelity and love, That Solomon has wisely spoken,-- 'A threefold cord is not soon broken.'
Absence | Art | Courage | Life | Life | Love | Power | Receive | Resentment | Right | Smile | Will | Art | Forgive |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, it is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
Absence | Generosity | Justification |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says "I" means something different by it from what every other person means. What is "I" to me is only "you" to you. And this "I" incorporates experience into itself by "getting it all together". Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Authentic empowerment is the knowing that you are on purpose, doing God's work, peacefully and harmoniously.
Absence | Circumstances |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
Whoever thinks as, from, or on behalf of, an entity which he believes himself to be, the more so if he tries to work on himself, by, with, or for such an entity - which is only a concept in mind - has not yet begun to understand what it is all about.
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
How many of the ways (disciplines, exercises, practices) recommended as helpful, or even necessary, for the attainment of Satori are not in fact consequences of that state erroneously suggested as means?