This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There's a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great 21st century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this city, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.
Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
O brave poets, keep back nothing; nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, truest Truth the fairest Beauty.
Looks |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The cypress stood up like a church that night we felt our love would hold, and saintly moonlight seemed to search and wash the whole world clean as gold; the olives crystallized the vales' broad slopes until the hills grew strong: the fireflies and the nightingales throbbed each to either, flame and song. The nightingales, the nightingales.
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire, of societies old and new, of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God's Will, united in spirit and in aim.
How does Love speak? In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek, and in the pallor that succeeds it; by the quivering lid of an averted eye-- the smile that proves the parent to a sigh thus doth Love speak.
The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man — the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more — is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.
Authority | Children | Father | Looks | Mother | Respect | Respect | Child |
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun speeding bullets through the brains of the folks that cause me pains.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I never told my love vocally still.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Why did you betray your own heart Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. ... You loved me - then what right had you to leave me? Because ... nothing God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of you own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave? [...] I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?
Doubt | Looks | Reputation | Shame |
Whatever you experience in your life is really but the out-picturing of your own thoughts and beliefs. Now, you can change these thoughts and beliefs, and then the outer picture must change too. The outer picture cannot change until you change your thought. Your real heartfelt conviction is what you out-picture or demonstrate, not your mere pious opinions or formal assents. Convictions cannot be adopted arbitrarily just because you want a healing. They are built up by the thoughts you think and the feelings you entertain day after day as you go through life. So, it is your habitual mental conduct that weaves the pattern of your destiny for you, and is not this just as it should be? So no one else can keep you out of your kingdom - or put you into it either. The story of your life is really the story of the relations between yourself and God.
Better | Change | Example | Experience | Fortune | Harmony | Man | Nature | People | Problems | Search | Thinking | Time | Will | World | Trouble |
It is not possible that you could ever find yourself anywhere where God was not fully present, fully active, able and willing to set you free.
Body | Consciousness | Desire | Forgiveness | Position | Prayer | Search | Will | Forgiveness | Forgive | Old |
How can you, without drying up, make things with the same pleasure, as a gift to others, for so long?
Search |
The Chinese government keeps installing video cameras in its most troubling cities. Not only do such cameras remind passersby about the panopticon they inhabit, they also supply the secret police with useful clues[...]. Such revolution in video surveillance did not happen without some involvement from Western partners. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by the Chinese government, have managed to build surveillance software that can automatically annotate and comment on what it sees, generating text files that can later be searched by humans, obviating the need to watch hours of video footage in search of one particular frame. (To make that possible, the researchers had to recruit twenty graduates of local art colleges in China to annotate and classify a library of more than two million images.) Such automation systems help surveillance to achieve the much needed scale, for as long as the content produced by surveillance cameras can be indexed and searched, one can continue installing new surveillance cameras. [...] The face-recognition industry is so lucrative that even giants like Google can’t resist getting into the game, feeling the growing pressure from saller players like Face.com, a popular tool that allows users to find and automatically annotate unique faces that apepar throughout their photo collections. In 2009 Face.com launched a Facebook application that first asks users to identify a Facebook friend of theirs ina photo and then proceeds to search the social networking site for other pictures in which that friend appears. By early 2010, the company boasted of scanning 9 billion pictures and identifying 52 million individuals. This is the kind of productivity that would make the KGB envious.
Effort | Empathy | Feelings | Focus | Important | Knowing | Need | Observation | Opposition | People | Problems | Reading | Search | Security | Space | Technology | Understanding | Waiting | Work |