This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
The consecration is a solemn transaction between God and the parish, as well as between the bishop and the parish--the parish, through its vestry and by a legal instrument, making the building over to God through the hands of the bishop; and God graciously accepting the gift and ratifying the transaction by the bishop's sentence of consecration, which declares it "separated henceforth from all unhallowed, ordinary, and common uses, and dedicated to the sole service of Almighty God." Henceforth this edifice is no more yours, but God's. Given to Him by your corporate and legal act, His name has been recorded here, His presence will be vouchsafed here, and each one of you, as you enter into these courts, can say with joyous hearts, "Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary."
Beauty | Eternal | God | Lord | Prayer | Spirit | Worship | Beauty | God |
He held the world upon his nose and this-a-way he gave a fling. His robes and symbols, ai-hi-hi and that-a-way he twirled the thing. Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats moved in the grass without a sound.
Prayer |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I am a little deaf, a little blind, a little impotent, and on top of this are two or three abominable infirmities, but nothing destroys my hope.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. [in response to Rousseau's The Social Contract]
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I have only made but one prayer in my life: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
My soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.
To him the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette; he had decreed in his heart that he would not accept the one without the other, and he was unalterably determined to demand from anybody, no matter whom, who might wish to compel him to live, from his grandfather, from Fate, even from Hell, the restitution of his vanished Eden.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Again and again I admonish my students both in America and Europe: 'Don't aim at success--the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run--in the long run, I say--success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.'
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.
I will get all My people near Me, for they are Mine, and I am theirs. Then, I will start teaching and training them, until they become entirely ego-free. For the last 25 years, it has all been sweetness, kindness, soft persuasion; hereafter, it will be different. I will drag them, place them on the table and operate. That is to say, I have no anger or hate. I have only Love.
Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.
Brotherhood | Prayer | Race |
A deserved and discriminating compliment is often one of the strongest encouragements and incentives to the diffident and self-distrustful.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
I have in mind something deeper than the simplification of our external programs, our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp. These do become simplified in holy obedience, and the poise and peace we have been missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, an internal simplification of the whole of one's personality, stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust listening ever to Eternity's whisper, walking with a smile into the dark.
Birth | God | Heart | Humility | Life | Life | Man | Obedience | Passion | Prayer | Submission | Following | God |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
Day | Earth | Eternal | God | Heaven | History | Insight | Life | Life | Little | Love | Mind | Obedience | Openness | Prayer | Present | Psychology | Reality | Sacred | Submission | Vision | Will | Words | Work | God |