This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Eleanor Brown, fully Nora Eleanor Louisa Hervey Brown
I have loved this disaster of a library since I was old enough to read.
My guru says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it...
Friend | Music | Words | World | Understand |
He was playing a character I had invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it's always like this, isn't it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.
Better | Conversation | Life | Life | People |
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me to not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough--but tomorrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
Computer | Day | Earth | Humanity | Life | Life | Little | Music | Nature | Nothing | People | Television | Time | World |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Of writing many books there is no end; and I who have written much in prose and verse for others' uses, will write now for mine,— will write my story for my better self, as when you paint your portrait for a friend, who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it long after he has ceased to love you, just to hold together what he was and is.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The place is all awave with trees, limes, myrtles, purple-beaded, acacias having drunk the lees of the night-dew, fain headed, and wan, grey olive-woods, which seem the fittest foliage for a dream.
You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings toward Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just as far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it; you love Him. It is not natural to us sinful, ungrateful beings to prefer His pleasure to our own or to follow His way instead of our own way, and nothing, nothing but love of Him can or does make us obedient to Him.
Body | Leisure | Little | Music | Recreation | Sacrifice | Soul | Will | Worth |
Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
Conversation | Tears | Will | Wise | Words |
After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
Conversation | Invention | Silence |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man.
Abundance | Body | Conversation | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Meditation | Money | Need | People | Reading | Spirit | Time | World | Think | Understand |
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
This instinct for totality, the counterpart of the feeling, gnawing and rankling, of dissatisfaction, is the germ of all religion. But man answers the craving need of a totality and a prospect into the future according to his historical conditions. Therefore all religions are genuine rings. None of them is a counterfeit, and none of them owns exclusively the truth and the whole truth.
Intention | Man | Means | Music | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Value |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall.
Music |