This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
So wise so young, they say, do never live long. Richard III, Act iii, Scene 1
To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.
There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint-please, please, please...give me the grace to win the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated staue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, My son-please, please, please...buy a ticket. Prayer is a realtionship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm ainming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift.
Belief | Books | Care | Decision | Destiny | Divinity | Faith | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nature | Reason | Religion | Scripture | Will | God |
You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here
Circumstances | Decision | Little | Need |
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 |
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.
Absolute | Attainment | Labor | Means | Nature | Sacrifice | Woman | Worth |
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Birth | Meaning | Responsibility |
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Authority | Conscience | Doubt | Fear | Justice | Knowledge | Position | Public | Responsibility | Struggle | Terror | Guilty | Understand |
Emiliano Zapata, fully Emiliano Zapata Salazar
The land free, the land free for all, land without overseers and without masters.
Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?
Love | Responsibility | Will | Afraid |
You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working.
Books | Day | God | Nature | Power | Teach | Truth | Will | Following | God | Learn | Think | Truths |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The solitude of the subject results from its relationship with the existing over which it is master. This mastery over existing is the power of beginning, of starting out from itself, starting out from itself neither to act nor to think, but to be.
Events | Good | Kindness | Little | Man | Organization | Politics | Utopia |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The small goodness from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. Unbeaten, it undergoes the violence of evil, which, as small goodness, it can neither vanquish nor drive out. A little kindness going only from man to man, not crossing distances to get to the places where events and forces unfold! A remarkable utopia of the good or the secret of its beyond.
God | Responsibility | Words | God |