This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.
Behavior | Blame | Fault | Influence | Means | People | Pity | War | World | Fault | Victim |
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 |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, strong and content I travel the open road.
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 |
No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Abstract | Art | Dependence | Earth | Family | Giving | Good | Guilt | Individual | Little | Means | Nature | Need | Present | Thought | Usefulness | Work | Art | Guilty | Thought |
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.
Until we end our violence against the earth- a matter ignored by most pacifists, as the issue of military violence is ignored by most conservationists-how can we hope to end our violence against each other? The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants.
Despair | Enlightenment | Grief | Land | Man | Pride | Sense | Thought | World | Think | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
Pity |
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.