This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It seems to me that policies which are content to create an ‘image’ of a benevolent and peace-loving America are valueless, because they lack the depth and the seriousness of motivation which are absolutely necessary for constructive action in a world crisis. Confronted with the difficult task of ‘assuming world leadership’ in a world from which it has remained traditionally and by preference isolated, America seems to have reacted with adolescent panic and truculence. Hostility, unpopularity and totally unsympathetic criticism have proved to be a serious test of the American political ideology.
Heart | Language | Life | Life | Love | Man | Perfection | Prayer | Time |
God seeks Himself in us, and the aridity and sorrow of our heart is the sorrow of God who is not known in us, who cannot find Himself in us because we do not dare to believe or trust the incredible truth that He could live in us, and live there out of choice, out of preference.
Asceticism | Battle | God | Good | Gratitude | Life | Life | Light | Man | Perfection | Pleasure | Purity | Rest | Simplicity | Struggle | Terror | World | Asceticism | God | Afraid |
How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: In our impatience we do away with him altogether.
Beginning | Blessedness | Faith | Humility | Life | Life | Perfection | Power | Problems | Selfishness | Soul | Value |
God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.
Better | Choice | God | Good | Important | Law | Life | Life | Man | Perfection | Will | God |
The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life.
Better | Capacity | Choice | Education | Freedom | Life | Life | Light | Man | People | Perfection | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Relationship | Risk | Spirit | Taste | Wants | World |
The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.
Greatness | Principles |
For though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
Belief | Perfection | Will |
We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Individual | Life | Life | Perfection |
There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand.
Gentleness | God | Greatness | Kindness | Mercy | Peace | Prayer | Sacrifice | God |
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
Attention | God | Greatness | Myth | Order | Peace | Will | God |
Before The Rain - We knew it would rain, for all the morn A spirit on slender ropes of mist Was lowering its golden buckets down Into the vapory amethyst. Of marshes and swamps and dismal fens-- Scooping the dew that lay in the flowers, Dipping the jewels out of the sea, To sprinkle them over the land in showers. We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed The white of their leaves, the amber grain Shrunk in the wind--and the lightning now Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain!
Good | Grave | Mankind | Perfection | Reading |
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Art | Care | Man | Perfection | Art |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
All merit ceases the moment we perform an act for the sake of its consequences. Truly, in this respect "we have our reward."
Growth | Perfection |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
After a child or two, that sort runs to fat, and you find you have married more of her than you bargained for.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
You never know how much a man can't remember until he is called as a witness.
I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life.
Art | Better | Error | Existence | Insight | Labor | Meaning | Nature | Perfection | Research | Thought | Will | Work | World | Art | Learn | Think | Thought |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
The well-known maxim, "While there is life there is hope," has a deeper meaning in reverse: "While there is hope there is life." Hope comes first, life follows. Hope gives power to life. Hope rouses life to continue, to expand, to grow, to reach out, to go on. Hope sees a light where there isn't any. Hope lights candles in millions of despairing hearts. Hope is the miracle medicine of the mind. It inspires the will to live. Hope is the physician's strongest ally. Hope is man's shield and buckler against defeat. "Hope," wrote Alexander Pope, "springs eternal in the human breast." And as long as it does man will triumph and move forward. Hope never sounds retreat. Hope keeps the banners flying. Hope revives deals, renews dreams, revitalizes visions. Hope scales the peak, wrestles with the impossible, achieves the highest aim. "The word which God has written on the brow of every man," wrote Victor Hugo, "is Hope." As long as man has hope no situation is hopeless.
Life springs from thousands of sources vibrant, hands up everyone who cling to, refuses to be expressed in phrases tedious, only accepts actions transparent, truthful words of love and pleasure
Choice | Cruelty | Doctrine | Energy | Error | Fate | Greatness | Insight | Labor | Life | Life | Light | Little | Love | Man | Marriage | Meanness | Men | Simplicity | Time | Truth | World | Cruelty | Fate | Child | Friends | Value |