This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.
Evidence | Heart | History | Hope | Improvement | Individual | Little | Protest | Public | Qualities | Spirit | Success |
A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.' The husband, unlike the manager or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.
Discontent | Government | Health | Light | People | Protest | Public | Understanding | Will | Wrong | Government | Crisis | Think |
Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
Conservation | Energy | Policy | Public | Rule | System | Crisis |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Look, stranger, on this island now the leaping light for your delight discovers, stand stable here and silent be, that through the channels of the ear may wander like a river the swaying sound of the sea.
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W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too ''personal'' style.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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We could lose, and I think we need to face that. I was speaking in Nebraska the other day and a very intelligent man came up afterward and said in a very kind and intelligent way, Of course you know you may be fighting a losing battle. And I answered, I’ve known for 30 years that I may be fighting a losing battle. The question to me is not whether I’m going to win or not, but whether I’m going to fight or not.
Capital punishment | Hypocrisy | Life | Life | Opposition | Public | Punishment | Society | Society | Think |
They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
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W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Out of the air a voice without a face proved by statistics that some cause was just in tones as dry and level as the place: no one was cheered and nothing was discussed.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Warm are the still and lucky miles, white shores of longing stretch away, a light of recognition fills the whole great day, and bright the tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, now greenly falls the learned shade across the sleeping brows and stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne on seas of shipwreck home at last: see! In a fire of praising burns the dry dumb past, and we our life-day long shall part no more.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.
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W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
Change | Children | Church | Courage | Events | Men | Parents | Power | Public | Religion | Revolution | Time | Will | World | Learn |