This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased with the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.
Day | Family | Fulfillment | Giving | Love | Man | Means | Men | Reason | Work | Learn |
The Peace of Wild Things - When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and detterence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. … I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.
We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.
Reason | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
We are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace — and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
I measure myself against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, for I reach right up to the sun, with my eye.
Reason |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The commonest complaint from the abler pupils is that if they finish a set of exercises ahead of the rest of the class they are simply given more of the same kind, which they find very boring.
Human race | Race | Reason | Learn |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.
Agitation | Authority | Change | Church | Conscience | Controversy | Doctrine | Enthusiasm | Force | Language | Light | Men | Method | Peace | Principles | Reason | Religion | Right | Sense | Spirit | Theology | Will |
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly… Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers… Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires… Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
The reflection of her here, and then there, is another shadow, another evasion, another denial. If she is everywhere, she is nowhere, to him. But this she has made.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
But perhaps to the inexperienced it will seem a marvel that human nature can comprehend such a great number of studies and keep them in the memory. Still, the observation that all studies have a common bond of union and intercourse with one another, will lead to the belief that this can easily be realized. For a liberal education forms, as it were, a single body made up of these members. Those, therefore, who from tender years receive instruction in the various forms of learning, recognize the same stamp on all the arts, and an intercourse between all studies, and so they more readily comprehend.
Reason |
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Darling, I thought of nothing mean; I thought of killing straight and clean. You're safe; that's gone, that wild caprice, but tell me once before I cease, which does your Church esteem the kinder role, to kill the body or destroy the soul?
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key. For to the right and left in the beams are the holes in the frames through which the strings of twisted sinew are stretched by means of windlasses and bars, and these strings must not be clamped and made fast until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman. For the arms thrust through those stretched strings must, on being let go, strike their blow together at the same.
Body | Individual | Reason |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
If our designs for private houses are to be correct, we must at the outset take note of the countries and climates in which they are built.
Appearance | Body | Individual | Nature | Reason | Work |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
We, however, at first followed the ancient number, and in the denarius fixed ten bronze coins; whence to this day the derived name keeps the number ten (denarius). And also because the fourth part was made up of two asses and a half, they called it sestertius. But afterwards they perceived that both numbers were perfect, both the six and the ten; and they threw both together, and made the most perfect number sixteen. Now of this they found the origin in the foot. For when two palms are taken from the cubit, there is left a foot of four palms, and the palm has four fingers. So it comes that the foot has sixteen fingers and the bronze denarius as many asses.
Reason |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Therefore it was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men, to the deliberate assembly, and to social intercourse.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Bourgeoisie | Power | Reason | Surrender | Will |