This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sara Teasdale, born Sara Trevor Teasdale, aka Sara Teasdale Filsinger
This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue flowers on this vine. "O Soul," I said, "have you no tears? Was not the body dear to you?" I heard my soul say carelessly, "The myrtle flowers will grow more blue.
Heart | Laughter | Life | Life | Love | Past | Tears | Terror | Words | Old |
Samuel J. Hazo, fully Samuel John Hazo
Because poetry is the language of felt thought and utterance… of admissions and oaths as sacred as life itself, it is evident in an economy by its absence. As long as people are perceived in economic terms alone, poetry (and all the other arts, for that matter) will be regarded as ornamental or irrelevant or simply dispensable… the disregard of poetry will be as fatal to their spiritual lives as the deprivation of oxygen would be to their physical lives. Why? Because poetry tells us who we are, what our surroundings mean to us, and what waits to be discovered beneath the apparent.…It is the language of the heart…It is at the same time the language of the senses.
Death | Faith | Laughter | Life | Life | Nothing | Promise | Quiet | Time | Waiting | War | Work | Worth | Learn |
Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
Without cause God gave us Being; without cause, give it back again.
Laughter |
Have patience to walk with short steps until you have wings to fly.
Contempt |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
You are a hidden God. Neither is the sublime communication nor the sensible awareness of His nearness a sure testimony of His gracious presence, nor is dryness and a lack of these a reflection of His absence. A person who wants to find Him should leave all things through affection and will, enter within himself in deepest recollection, and regard things as though they were nonexistence. God is hidden in the soul. You yourself are His dwelling and His secret chamber and hiding place. God is never absent. In order to find Him you should forget all your possessions and all creatures and hide in the interior, secret chamber of your spirit. And there, closing the door behind you, you should pray to your Father in secret. Remaining hidden with Him, you will experience Him in hiding, and love and enjoy Him in hiding. God is the substance and concept of faith, and faith is the secret and the mystery. Faith and love are like the blind man’s guides. They will lead you along a path unknown to you, to the place where God is hidden. Pay no attention to anything which your faculties can grasp. You should never desire satisfaction in what you understand about God, but in what you do not understand about Him Never stop with loving and delighting in your understanding and experience of God, but love and delight in what is neither understandable nor perceptible of Him. Spiritual wounds of love are very delightful and desirable. The soul would desire to be ever dying a thousand deaths from the thrusts of the lance, for they make her go out of herself and enter into God. The wounded soul, strengthened from the fire caused by the wound, went out after her Beloved Who wounded her, calling for Him, that He might heal her. One goes out from oneself through self-forgetfulness.
Charity | Contempt | Need | Practice | Silence | Work | Understand |
Some force whole regions, in despite O' geography, to change their site; Make former times shake hands with latter, And that which was before come after. But those that write in rhyme still make The one verse for the other's sake; For one for sense, and one for rhyme, I think 's sufficient at one time.
We deny the assertion made by some of our opponents when they say the American Federation of Labor is against political action. We are against the the American labor movement being made a political party machine.
Contempt | Courage | Government | Improvement | Mercy | Nothing | Order | Purpose | Purpose | Rights | Time | Will | Government | Guilty |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.
Contempt | Punishment |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.
Laughter |
I strongly reject any conceptual scheme that places our options on a line, and holds that the only alternative to a pair of extreme positions lies somewhere between them. More fruitful perspectives often require that we step off the line to a site outside the dichotomy.
Ideas | Imagination | Laughter | Men | Respect | Worth | Respect | Understand |
It is a folly to deny that which a man’s own nature witnesseth to him. The whole frame of bodies and souls bears the impress of the infinite power and wisdom of the Creator: a body framed with an admirable architecture, a soul endowed with understanding, will, judgment, memory, imagination. Man is the epitome of the world, contains in himself the substance of all natures, and the fullness of the whole universe; not only in regard of the universalness of his knowledge, whereby he comprehends the reasons of many things; but as all the perfections of the several natures of the world are gathered and united in man, for the perfection of his own, in a smaller volume. In his soul he partakes of heaven, in his body of the earth. There is the life of plants, the sense of beasts, and the intellectual nature of angels.