This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
To forecast our sorrows is only to increase the suffering without increasing our strength to bear them.—Many of life's noblest enterprises might never have been undertaken if all the difficulties and defects could be foreseen.
So please smile. Smile with your eyes, not just with your lips.
If that the men that lovers them pretende to women weren faithful, good, and true, and dreaden them to deceive and offende, women to love them woulde not eschew; but every day hath man an hearte new it upon one abide can no while. What force is it, such one for to beguile?
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
Listening | Men | People | Plan | Price | Speech | Time | Will | World | Think | Understand |
Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
It is essential to the Inner Game of Coaching that the coach try to see from the point of view of the person being coached. By learning to listen to the client non-judgmentally, the coach learns the most important elements of the craft. Learning to ask questions that help clients reveal more and more to themselves is a natural outcome of such listening. The coach’s questions are geared to finding out information not for the purpose of recommending solutions, but for the purpose of helping clients think for themselves and find their own solutions. Ideally, the end of every coaching conversation is that the client leaves feeling more capable of mobility.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
He... preferred always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an instance of law more refined.
Tinsel in February, tinsel in august. There are things in a man besides his reason.
Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, o sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, there is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
Absence | Children | Distinguish | Listening | Melody | Nothing |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked Rags. Petrol. Matches. And this note should be attached to it. Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this 'education!
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.
Darkness | Feelings | God | Listening | People | Power | Rest | Wavering | World | God |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
Capitalism | Economics | Envy | Force | Listening | Past | Rites | Sacrifice | Understand |
Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.