This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm; time and fevers burn away individual beauty from thoughtful children, and the grave proves the child ephemeral; but in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie: mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
Belief | Deeds | God | Love | Man | Order | People | Prosperity | Sacrifice | Deeds | God | Victim |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is in. In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The other facet that I am particularly interested in at this staging, is the shift from the old priest/priestess model, which is the individual who, for whatever reason, has found the pathway in, and then returns and, essentially, guides a gathering of people and spends the rest of his or her life doing that – where the individuals are not really brought into the ability to guide, they’re really the recipient of a divine image. And that’s essentially what has been played out for thousands of years. I feel what is, transpiring at this point is what this work is all based in. Which is that individuals are being brought into the ability to tap the resource individually and will be endowed, endowed individually so that when we come together it’s no longer the process of the have and have-nots. It now is a gathering of individuals who know how to find the inner center and when they come to join with others, they’re ready to share those resources in…in a wonderful sense of human camaraderie and, and enjoyment of gathering rather than the idea of taking an inspiration from an inspired one. And there is the process of the mystery training, which a lot of this work is, which is preparing you for such a possibility. So although I am using an old model (which is the teaching model) my intent is to bring you to the bridge from which you will self-discover. You will come to a unique experience of the divine mystery. And when we gather, one is awed by the range in which the mystery reveals itself – very creative and very I find…inspiring. And I believe this is the difference between the Piscean Age and the Aquarian Age that we’re embarking on. Ah…wonderful form prior to, which is One serving the Many. In the next phase the Many serve the One. Which is the Many serve the One inside.
Death | Important | Innocence | Love | Need | Order | Sacrifice |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
Absolute | Equality | Freedom | Genius | Life | Life | Man | Men | Opportunity | Order | Right | World |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
As a single atom, man is an enigma: as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent: as a species, the offspring of necessity. The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the operation of a single Mind is a conjecture based on analogy, and analogy may be a deceptive guide.
Destiny | Government | Man | Men | Order | Posterity | Theories | Government |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.
Doubt | Feelings | Ideas | Little | Order | Purity | World |
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
Mind | Order | Pleasure | Self | Time | Understanding | Understand |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.
Agitation | Authority | Change | Church | Conscience | Controversy | Doctrine | Enthusiasm | Force | Language | Light | Men | Method | Peace | Principles | Reason | Religion | Right | Sense | Spirit | Theology | Will |
All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.
Events | Experience | Order | Past | Time |
I know my lazy, leaden twang is like the reason in a storm; and yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.
Order |
Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)
Beauty | Evil | Existence | God | Good | Man | Order | People | Search | Time | Wrong | Beauty | God | Child |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when, above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority.