This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a portal; but in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.
Action | Duality | Energy | Intelligence | Love | Pain | Pleasure | Sorrow | Wholeness | Will | Afraid |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
Beauty | Enough | Life | Life | Nature | People | Sorrow | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
Beauty | Better | Books | Children | Enough | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Nothing | Past | People | Sorrow | Beauty | Friends |
The devotee keeps his Beloved clasped tightly to his heart. The fools perform devotional worship by showing off; they dance and dance and jump all around, but they only suffer in terrible pain.
Wise men say that the root of victory is consultation and discussion with learned and wise men. .
The one who abandons one’s own camp and joins the enemy’s camp will be killed by the very men of his former camp after the latter camp is completely destroyed by the former.
Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming
A scholar should gather up spirit and energy in single-mindedness. If your quest for virtue is for reasons of fame and fortune, you will never amount to anything. If in scholarly endeavors you indulge in fashionable verse and stylistic flourishes, you cannot attain depth and stability of mind.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise.
Age | Beginning | Children | God | Humility | Joy | Knowing | Life | Life | Love | Mercy | Naiveté | Obedience | Problems | Simplicity | Sorrow | Time | God |
A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2
Sorrow |
Be stirring as the time, be fire with fire, threaten the threatener, and outface the brow of bragging horror; so shall inferior eyes, that borrow their behaviors from the great, grow great by your example and put on the dauntless spirit of resolution. The Life and Death of King John (Bastard at V, i)
But come, I'll tell thee all my whole device When I am in my coach, which stays for us At the park gate; and therefore haste away, For we must measure twenty miles to-day. The Merchant of Venice (Portia at III, iv)