This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As we advance in life these things fall off one by one, and I suspect we are left with only Homer and Virgil, perhaps with only Homer alone.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.
Chance |
Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty. On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing for grace or whether one is a defender of nature, it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine? How much can God demand of me - how much can I demand of Him? Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place. How much is mine? Should such a question ever be asked? Should such a division ever be made at all? To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all that is His is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine? He is mine. And what is His? I am His.
Love | Openness | Present | Reality | Spirit | Understanding | Witness |
This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself.
Language | Love | Openness | Prayer | Present | Reality | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Witness |
We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months.
Menachem Ussishkin, fully Avraham Menahem Mendel Ussishkin
When the Jewish people will have redeemed the Land of Israel, the Land if Israel will redeem the Jewish people.
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
Giving ourselves permission to fail sidesteps any concern we might otherwise feel about performance. It allows us to stop trying. When we allow this, we don’t fail. It releases us from the fear of failure.
In conclusion, I have endeavored, with what success has been already determined by the voice of my own country, to give a panorama of Irish life among the people … and in doing this, I can say with solemn truth that I painted them honestly and without reference to the existence of any particular creed or party.
Adventure | Appetite | Battle | Beauty | Consciousness | Consequences | Father | Fighting | Friend | Influence | Love | Man | Means | Mirth | Nothing | Sense | Silence | Spirit | Vengeance | Will | Woe | Beauty | Friends |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.
We cannot, with good conscience, expect the British to set up an orderly schedule for the liberation of India before we have decided for ourselves to make all who live in America free.
Ideas | Imperialism | War |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman. A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,—it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence. His brow was open, generous, reflective, his features handsome and somewhat severe. There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.
It has been a long while since the United States had any imperialistic designs toward the outside world. But we have practiced within our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism.
Government | Government |