This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy the sunlight today, mix good cheer with friends today, enjoy it and bless God for it. Do not look back on happiness - or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
The first party of painted savages who raised a few huts upon the Thames did not dream of the London they were creating, or know that in the lighting the fire on their hearth they were kindling one of the great foci of Time... All the grand agencies which the progress of mankind evolves are formed in the same unconscious way. They are the aggregate results of countless single wills, each of which, thinking merely of its own end, and perhaps fully gaining it, is at the same time enlisted by Providence in the secret service of the world.
Mankind | Progress | Providence | Service | Thinking | Time | Wills | World |
Death be not proud, though some have called Thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so... One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not, for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty... The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream - he awoke and found it truth.
Beauty | Heart | Imagination | Love | Nothing | Truth | Beauty |
The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth.
Imagination | Truth |
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved with mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
Children | Death | Grave | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | Unity | Will | Blessed | Learn |
The elusive nature of a concrete, permanent, unchanging self is quite a hopeful observation. It means that you can stop taking yourself so damn seriously and get out from under the pressures of having the details of your personal life be central to the operating of the universe. By recognizing and letting go of selfing impulses, we accord the universe a little more room to make things happen. Since we are folded into the universe and participate in its unfolding, it will deter in the face of too much self-centered, self-indulgent, self-critical, self-insecure, self-anxious activity on our part, and arrange for the dream world of our self-oriented thinking to look and feel only too real.
Life | Life | Little | Means | Nature | Observation | Self | Thinking | Universe | Will | World |