This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Song From The Persian - Ah, sad are they who know not love, But, far from passion's tears and smiles, Drift down a moonless sea, beyond The silvery coasts of fairy isles. And sadder they whose longing lips Kiss empty air, and never touch The dear warm mouth of those they love -- Waiting, wasting, suffering much. But clear as amber, fine as musk, Is life to those who, pilgrim-wise, Move hand in hand from dawn to dusk, Each morning nearer Paradise. Ah, not for them shall angels pray! They stand in everlasting light, They walk in Allah's smile by day, And slumber in his heart by night.
Tim McGraw, fully Samuel Timothy "Tim" McGraw
Look deep inside the eyes of a woman, see the man you want to be.
I know of no ideas or notions that have a better claim to be accounted simple and original, than those of space and time.
Memory |
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
O gather me the rose, the rose, While yet in flower we find it, For summer smiles, but summer goes, And winter waits behind it. For with the dream foregone, foregone, The deed foreborn forever, The worm Regret will canker on, And time will turn him never. So were it well to love, my love, And cheat of any laughter The fate beneath us, and above, The dark before and after. The myrtle and the rose, the rose, The sunshine and the swallow, The dream that comes, the wish that goes The memories that follow!
My native place was [alive] with old legends, tales, traditions, customs and superstitions; so that in my early youth, even beyond the walls of my own humble roof, they met me in every direction.
Better | Confidence | Education | Esteem | Father | Heart | Imagination | Integrity | Language | Legends | Man | Memory | Mind | Mother | Peculiarity | People | Piety | Present | Rank | Receive | Spirit | Will | Youth | Youth | Blessed | Circumstance | Old |
How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude; but grant me still a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper--solitude it sweet.
What we admire we praise; and when we praise,advance it into notice, that its worth acknowledged, others may admire it too.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Here is my Farm Relief bill: Every time a Southerner plants nothing on his farm but cotton year after year, and the Northerner nothing but wheat or corn, why, take a hammer and hit him twice right between the eyes. You may dent your hammer, but it will do more real good than all the bills you can pass in a year.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . .
Experience | Fallacy | Giving | Happy | Little | Looks | Memory | Method | Mind | Story | Sympathy | Truth | Work |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by circa 1920.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.
Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.
Memory | Nonsense | Obligation | Religion |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The moon gives you light, and the bugles and the drums give you music, and my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, my heart gives you love.
The prophet is engaged in a battle for language in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Oratory has deep agonistic roots. The development of the vast rhetorical tradition was distinctive of the west and was related, whether as cause or effect or both, to the tendency among the Greeks and their cultural epigoni to maximize oppositions, in the mental as in the extramental world: this by contrast with Indians and Chinese, who programmatically minimized them.
Deeds | Experience | Memory | Nature | Deeds |
A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.