This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Suso, aka Amandus or Saint Henry Suso
All creatures have existed eternally in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.” Eternally, all creatures are God in God... So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less.
Character | Eternity | God | Life | Life | Nothing | Power | Time | God |
Statius, fully Publius Papinius Statius NULL
Give not reins to your inflamed passions; take time and a little delay; impetuosity manages all things badly.
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality and aimed at goodness more than greatness.
Character | Greatness | Knowledge | Man | Morality | Practice | Time | Wisdom |
Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.
Character | Leisure | Men | Temptation | Time |
Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
Real sorrow is almost as difficult to discover as real poverty. An instinctive delicacy hides the rays of the one and the wounds of the other.
Surely the shortest commencement address in history - and for me one of the most memorable - was that of Dr. Harold E. Hyde, President of New Hampshire's Plymouth State College. He reduced his message to the graduating class to these three ideals: 'Know yourself - Socrates. Control yourself - Cicero; Give yourself - Christ'
Grief is a wound that needs attention in order to heal. To work through and complete grief means to face our feelings openly and honestly, to express and release our feelings fully and to tolerate and accept our feeling for however long it takes for the wound to heal. We fear that once acknowledged grief will bowl us over. The truth is that grief experienced does dissolve. Grief unexpressed is grief that lasts indefinitely.
Attention | Character | Fear | Feelings | Grief | Means | Order | Truth | Will | Work |
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
If there is an evil in this world, it is sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of healthy, of coronets and mitres, is only evil as they occasion sorrow; take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.
Character | Evil | Heart | Man | Rest | Sorrow | World | Loss |