This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When drawing a face, any face, it is as if curtain after curtain, mask after mask, falls away, until a final mask remains, one that can no longer be removed, reduced. By the time the drawing is finished, I know a great deal about that face, for no face can hide itself for long. But although noting escapes the eye, all is forgiven beforehand. The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accept the masks in gratitude as it does the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.
All motion or natural action takes place in time, more or less rapidly, but still in determined moments well ascertained by nature. Even those actions which appear to take effect suddenly, and in the twinkling of an eye (as we express it), are found to admit of greater or less rapidity.
Whilst he boasteth that he can discern the least mote in the eye of another, he is not able to see the huge block that puts out the sight of both his eyes.
The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.
Axioms | Nature | Sense | Understanding |
My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.
Character | Heart | Man | Mind | Nothing | Retirement | Solitude | Tenderness | Wants |
Wisdom views with an indifferent eye all finite joys, all blessings born to die.
In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of equal perfection, but they are very unstable. The reason and the heart remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick and seems to have been more docile to the education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility.
Art | Beauty | Education | Evidence | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Nature | Perfection | Reality | Reason | Speculation | Beauty |
In the elder days of Art, builders wrought with greatest care each minute and unseen part; for the gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well both the unseen and the seen; make the house where gods may dwell beautiful, entire, and clean, else our lives are incomplete standing in these walls of Time, broken stairways, where the feet stumble, as they seek to climb. Build today, then, strong and sure, with a firm and ample base; and ascending and secure shall tomorrow finds its place. Thus alone can we attain to those turrets, where the eye sees the world as one vast plain, and one boundless reach of sky.
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Civilization | Faith | Imagination |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life.
The hungry of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.
So sharply and clearly marked are the boundaries of morality and self-love that even the commonest eye cannot fail to distinguish whether a thing belongs to the one or the other.
Distinguish | Love | Morality | Self | Self-love |
The eye is the inlet to the soul, and it is well to beware of him whose visual organs avoid your honest regard.
The fact that the eye constantly thrusts outwards distracts us from self-knowledge and the way inwards. It dissipates attention... The eye says I. We sense when someone is looking at us. Their gaze insists: Pay attention to me! Almost everyone is also aware of that when the observer is standing behind us. We notice after a while. Someone is there. Who is it? Who would not, however, know if someone were listening to us if he or she did not say so. The listener does not put the emphasis on himself or event the other person. He does not insist on a separation between subject and object. The ear establishes a 'more correct' relationship between ourselves and others. It implies unity rather than division. Eye and ear need one another. Ear and eye are not alternatives.
Attention | Knowledge | Listening | Need | Object | Relationship | Self | Self-knowledge | Sense | Unity |
The eye can only compare and estimate; the ear measures... Both the ear and the eye can evaluate, supplying us with intellectual, psychological, and emotional information of qualitative relevance. But only the ear can measure, thereby mediating quantitative and numerically precise information. If the eye wants to operate quantitatively it can at most estimate, but - as we all know - it is only able to provide approximations, and very often miscalculates. That is why the term 'optical illusion' exists in our language.
The world is a single whole. Everything is linked with everything else. The world 'sounds'. It is a 'chord'. The imagination and freedom necessary for feeling, experiencing, and living through - rather than merely knowing - these are more likely to be associated with an ana-logical process of perception than with logical thinking. Logic aims at security. The ana-logician has the courage to embark on risk and adventure. Logic is goal-oriented and passes judgment. Analogy ponders and establishes relationships. The logician sees. The ana-logician listens... The eye glimpses surfaces and is attached to them, always remaining superficial (on the surface). The ear penetrates deep into the realms it investigates through hearing.
Adventure | Aims | Courage | Freedom | Imagination | Judgment | Knowing | Logic | Perception | Risk | Security | Thinking | World |
Those evils I deserve, yet despair not of His final pardon whose ear is ever open and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant.