This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes and enzyme molecules.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
More deeply still with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of forms, ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression; the scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunshine brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of that shape the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let the divine beauty bring to me divine soul.
Beauty | Perfection | Will | Beauty |
To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.
Manners | Perfection | Thinking | Think |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Look up to thy Maker, O soul of mine, Thy Creator remember whilst thou art young; Cry morning and night to His grace divine, And in all thy songs let His name be sung. On earth the Lord is thy portion and cup, And when from thy body thou goest lone, A place for thy rest He hath builded up And made thee a nest underneath His throne. Wherefore morning and night I will bless my Lord, And from all that hath breath let His praise be poured.
Art | Body | God | Life | Life | Perfection | Purity | Soul | World | Art | God |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
It would have been more profitable to love the sun in the sky, which at least our eyes perceive truly, than those chimeras offered to a mind that had been led astray through its eyes.
Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure
The life of God – precisely because God is triune – does not belong to God alone. God who dwells in inaccessible light and eternal glory comes to us in the face of Christ and the activity of the Holy Spirit. Because of God’s outreach to the creature, God is said to be essentially relational, ecstatic, fecund, alive as passionate love. Divine life is therefore also our life. The heart of the Christian life is to be united with the God of Jesus Christ by means of communion with one another. The doctrine of the Trinity is, ultimately, therefore a teaching not about the abstract nature of God, nor about God in isolation from everything other than God, but a teaching about God’s life with us and our life with each other.
Fidelity | Man | Perfection |
Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
But as for me, I desire this privilege from the Lord, that never may I have any privilege from man, except to do reverence to all, and to convert the world by obedience to the Holy Rule rather by example than by word.
Desire | Esteem | Honor | Lord | Love | Order | Perfection | Practice |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
This dark, loving knowledge, which is faith, serves as a means for the divine union in this life as does the light of glory for the clear vision of God in the next. A person should not store up as treasures these visions, nor have the desire to cling to them. Our journey toward God must proceed through the negation of all. One should remain in emptiness and darkness regarding all creatures. He should base his love and joy on what he neither sees nor feels – that is, upon God who is incomprehensible and transcendent.
Affliction | Contemplation | Darkness | God | Light | Love | Mystical | Order | Perfection | Soul | Wisdom | God | Contemplation |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
This soul is so near to God that it is transformed in the flames of love, wherein Father, Son and Holy Spirit communicate themselves to it. The effect of the living flames is to make the soul live spiritually in God, and experience the life of God. Love is ever throwing out sparks; the effect of life is to wound, that it may enkindle with love and cause delight. God wars against all the imperfect habits of the soul and, purifying the soul with the heat of His flame, He uproots these habits from it and prepares it so that at last He may enter it and be united with it by His sweet, peaceful and glorious love, as is the fire when it has entered the wood. At death the rivers of love of the soul are about to enter the sea. Burning with sweetness. Consuming not but enlightening.
God | Love | Perfection | Soul | Understanding | Will | God | Old |
The pleasure and the movement of the will towards kind things is properly speaking, Love.
Life | Life | Love | Perfection |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
The soul goes about the things of God with much greater freedom and satisfaction of the soul than before it entered the dark night of sense. It now very readily finds in its spirit the most serene and loving contemplation and spiritual sweetness without the labor of meditation. This sweetness overflows into their senses more than was usual… since the sense is now purer. But they also endure many frailties and sufferings and weaknesses of the stomach and are fatigued in spirit. After the second night of the spirit: no raptures and no torments of the body because their senses are now neither clouded nor transported.
Death | Desire | Eternal | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Mind | Occupation | Perfection | Pleasure | Refinement | Soul | Strength | Understanding | Will | Old |
Faith has to do with things that are not seen and hope with things that are not at hand.
Good | Harm | Man | Order | Perfection | Punishment | Reason | Soul | Will |
In this country my Lords... the individual subject... 'has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them'
Affliction | Character | Distinguish | Feelings | Man | Perfection | Sensibility | Society | Suffering | Friendship | Society | Blessed |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have anything else to amuse them.
From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.
Experience | Love | Perfection |
The profound mystery in the Vedanta was taught in the previous cycle. It should not be given to one whose passions have not been subdued, nor to one who is not a son or a disciple.
Absence | Perfection |
Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever. This obligation cannot legitimately be held to be limited by the insufficiency of power or the nature of the responsibilities until everything possible has been done to explain the necessity of the limitation to those who will suffer by it; the explanation must be completely truthful and must be such as to make it possible for them to acknowledge the necessity. No combination of circumstances ever cancels this obligation. If there are circumstances which seem to cancel it as regards a certain man or category of men, they impose it in fact all the more imperatively. The thought of this obligation is present to all men, but in very different forms and in very varying degrees of clarity. Some men are more and some are less inclined to accept — or to refuse — it as their rule of conduct.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Like many men who override the opinions of others, Challenger was exceedingly sensitive when anyone took a liberty with his own
Distinguish | Enough | History | Life | Life | Mortal | Perfection | Present | Science | Learn |