This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It seems that a certain power of achievement is given to man. He appropriates creation to human needs. Such is his function. He has the audacity necessary to accomplish it; one might also say the impiety.... Man, this short-lived being, this creature always surrounded by death, undertakes the infinite.... He has his idea of fitness; the universe must accept it. Besides, has he not a universe of his own? He expects to make of it what seems to him good. A universe is raw material. The world, work of God, is man's canvas. Everything restrains man, but nothing stops him. He overcomes limits by jumping over them. The impossible is a perpetually receding frontier.... Formerly he took all this trouble for Xerxes; today, less foolish, he takes the trouble for himself. This diminution of stupidity is called progress.
Soul |
One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.
Love! Is a be two then we are not only one. A man and a woman melting together in an angel, it's heaven
Should we continue to look upwards Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds. (Les Miserables)
Soul |
There are axioms in probity, in honesty, in justice, just as much as there are axioms in geometry; and the truths of morality are no more at the mercy of a vote than are the truths of algebra.
In certain vast enterprises when the superhuman seems necessary, bravery is little less than madness.
Suspicions are nothing more nor less than wrinkles. Early youth has none. What overwhelms Othello glides over Candide.
This uninspired play on words had the effect of a stone thrown into a country pond...All the frogs fell silent.
One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.
Soul |
The stars were glittering in the heaven's dusk meadows, Far west, among those flowers of the shadows, The thin, clear crescent lustrous over her, Made Ruth raise question, looking through the bars Of heaven, with eyes half-oped, what God, what comer Unto the harvest of the eternal summer, Had flung his golden hook down on the field of stars.
Soul |
The sunshine was enchanting: the branches of the trees had that gentle tremor of May that seems to come from the birds' nests more than from the wind. A hardy little bird, probably in love, was desperately singing away in a tall tree.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth--that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way--an honorable way--in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."
Whosoever we may be, we are adventurers of the world of our thoughts.