This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labor of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.
Extreme | Idleness | Indigestion | Inequality | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Opportunity | Passion | Wisdom |
Prayer is nothing you do; prayer is someone you are. Prayer is not about doing, but about being. Prayer is about being alone in God's presence. Prayer is being so alone that God is the only witness to your existence. The secret of prayer is God affirming your life.
Existence | God | Life | Life | Nothing | Prayer | Wisdom | Witness | God |
Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit; and our wandering thoughts in prayer are but the neglects of meditation and recessions from that duty; according as we neglect meditation, so are our prayers imperfect, meditation being the soul of prayer and the intention of our spirit.
Duty | Intention | Language | Meditation | Neglect | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Wisdom |
The Lord's Prayer is short and mysterious, and, like the treasures of the Spirit, full of wisdom and latent senses: it is not improper to draw forth those excellencies which are intended and signified by every petition, that by so excellent an authority we may know what is lawful to beg of God.
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheeps or goats that nourish a blind life within the brain, if, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
Better | Dreams | Earth | Gold | Knowing | Life | Life | Men | Prayer | Wisdom | World |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
As the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent.
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country.
Cheerfulness | Happy | Health | Labor | Prosperity | Wisdom |
Holy, humble, penitent, believing, earnest, persevering prayer is never lost; it always prevails to the accomplishment of the thing sought, or that with which the suppliant will be better satisfied in the end, according to the superior wisdom of his heavenly father, in which he trusts.