This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire, bring me my spear—o clouds, unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire! I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame; I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done; I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate; I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women; I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth; I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners; I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest; I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like; all these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
Cause | Imperfection | Nature | Praise | Time |
Light your lamp and see the five windows in this image through which error enters your soul; as the prophet (Jeremiah) said, ‘Death comes in at the windows... through the eye it looks for strange things as with the other senses. So you must close these windows and open them only when necessary.
Effort | Experience | God | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Lord | Love | Men | Order | People | Praise | Study | God |
An Invocation - We are what suns and winds and waters make us; the mountains are our sponsors, and the rills fashion and win their nursling with their smiles. But where the land is dim from tyranny, there tiny pleasures occupy the place of glories and of duties; as the feet of fabled faeries when the sun goes down trip o’er the grass where wrestlers strove by day. Then Justice, call’d the Eternal One above, is more inconstant than the buoyant form that burst into existence from the froth of ever-varying ocean: what is best then becomes worst; what loveliest, most deform’d. The heart is hardest in the softest climes, the passions flourish, the affections die. O thou vast tablet of these awful truths, that fillest all the space between the seas, spreading from Venice’s deserted courts to the Tarentine and Hydruntine mole, what lifts thee up? What shakes thee? ’t is the breath of God. Awake, ye nations! spring to life! Let the last work of his right hand appear fresh with his image, Man.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Try to imagine a culture in which no one has ever "looked up" anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression "to look up something" is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.
Alienation | Consciousness | Good | Need | Nothing | Praise | Writing | Understand |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Make yourself available for success, and know and trust in an invisible force that's all-providing.
Nothing is given that is not Taken, and nothing taken That was not first gift. The gift is balanced by its total loss, and yet, And yet the light breaks in, Heaven seizing its moments That are at once its own and yours.
Day | Future | Government | Hope | Little | Love | Man | Mind | Mystery | Praise | Will | Work | Government | Approval |
Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard... But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?
Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.