This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Humor is properly the exponent of low things; that which first renders them poetical to the mind. The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius. He who wants it, be his other gifts what they may, has only half a mind; an eye for what is above him, not for what is about him or below him. Now, among all writers of any real poetic genius, we cannot recollect one who, in this respect, exhibits such total deficiency as Friedrich Schiller. In his whole writings there is scarcely any vestige of it, scarcely any attempt that way. His nature was without Humor; and he had too true a feeling to adopt any counterfeit in its stead. Thus no drollery or caricature, still less any barren mockery, which, in the hundred cases are all that we find passing current as Humor, discover themselves in Schiller. His works are full of labored earnestness; he is the gravest of all writers.
A noble book! All men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem,-man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on earth; and all in such free-flowing outlines,-grand in its sincerity; in its simplicity and its epic melody.
I call the Book of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen.
Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!
Ideals | Perfection | Reality | Will | World |
One of the most essential preparations for eternity is delight in praising God; a higher acquirement, I do think, than even delight and devotedness in prayer.
Energy | Greatness | History | Individual | Peculiarity | Providence | Think |
The heart always sees before than the head can see.
History | Perfection | Sacred | Silence | Will |
The chambers of the East are opened in every land, and the sun come forth to sow the earth with orient pearl. Night, the ancient mother, follows him with her diadem of stars. * * * Bright creatures! how they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven.
Force | Insight | Law | Nature | Perfection | Will | Circumstance | Intellect | Understand |
From behind the shadow of the still small voice--more awful than tempest or earthquake--more sure and persistent than day and night--is always sounding full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.
Health | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
Humanity | Perfection | Soul | Spirit | Thinking |
How many people are there in the world of today who have “lost their faith” along with the vain hopes and illusions of their childhood? What they called “faith” was just one among all the other illusions. They placed all their hope in a certain sense of spiritual peace, of comfort, of interior equilibrium, of self-respect. Then when they began to struggle with the real difficulties and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to “believe.” That is to say it became impossible for them to comfort themselves, to reassure themselves, with the images and concepts they found reassuring in childhood. Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, of spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days — until you fold up and collapse into despair.
Cost | Perfection | Stupidity |
One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favor of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Charity | Courage | Experience | Perfection | Success | Taste | Will | Happiness | Understand |
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
Applause | Error | Life | Life | Logic | Perfection | Success |
Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign, but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident. It is the great task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of all is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society.
Absolute | Dependence | God | Life | Life | Light | Lord | Man | Need | Perfection | Prayer | God |
I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts.
Confidence | God | Humility | Man | Meaning | Mistrust | Mystery | Perfection | Power | Present | Self | Time | Unique | Waste | World | Theoretical | God | Afraid |
How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?