This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Live each season as it passes; breath the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Taste |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion.
Body | Control | Devotion | Purity | Sensuality | Spirit | Time |
The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness - the taste and strain from the lees of the vat.
Bitterness | Sorrow | Taste |
If we judge objects merely according to concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can be no rule according to which anyone is to be forced to recognizes anything as beautiful... The beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept... There can be no objective rule of taste which shall determine by means of concept what is beautiful.
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it.
Appearance | Genius | Reputation | Taste |
Morality... must have the more power over the human heart the more purely it is exhibited. Whence it follows that, if the law of morality and the image of holiness and virtue are to exercise any influence at all on our souls, they can do so only so far as they are laid to heart in their purity as motives, unmixed with any view to prosperity, for it is in suffering that they display themselves most nobly.
Display | Heart | Influence | Law | Morality | Motives | Power | Prosperity | Purity | Suffering | Virtue | Virtue |
John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.
Eternity | Grace | Heart | Individual | Principles | Purity | Self | Thought | World | Thought |
No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair.
Age | Civilization | Despair | Taste | Time |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
Most of us believe that the freedom and power of adulthood is our due, but we have little taste for adult responsibility and self-discipline.
Discipline | Freedom | Little | Power | Responsibility | Self | Taste |
Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Appetite | Eternal | God | History | Kindness | Life | Life | Love | Money | Music | Pleasure | Poetry | Pride | Purity | God |
Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always fixed on the earth, and intent upon their loaden tables, they pamper themselves in luxury and excess.
Day | Earth | Excess | Life | Life | Luxury | Pleasure | Taste | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
Bitterness | Civilization | Good | Laughter | Men | Property | Riches | Taste | Will | Riches |
Those who love with purity consider not the gift of the lover, but the love of the giver.