This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheeps or goats that nourish a blind life within the brain, if, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
Better | Dreams | Earth | Gold | Knowing | Life | Life | Men | Prayer | Wisdom | World |
The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death.
Body | Death | Earth | Mind | Music | Nations | Sin | Wisdom | Woe |
If all Earth history is compressed into one “day”, the sea is mixed two thousand times in every “minute” of it, distributing warmth and energy evenly round our water-cooled and air-conditioned planet. Every eighteen “seconds” on this collapsed time scale, the world’s rivers dump enough dissolved salts into the sea to double its concentration, but this nevertheless remains around a resolute and reasonable 3 per cent. It is vital that this should be so, because few living cells can survive a salinity which exceeds, even for just a few seconds, a value of 6 per cent. Half the living matter in the world is still found in the sea, and that fact alone seems to make the chemical regulation not only necessary, but possible.
Day | Earth | Energy | Enough | History | Regulation | Time | Wisdom | World | Value |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, the races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, the oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near, the lands to be welded together.
Earth | God | Marriage | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Wisdom |
We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference.
Action | Attention | Choice | Earth | Harmony | Peace | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Thought |
The time we spend on earth is but one tick of the eternal clock in an unending eternity. We are here in mortality for a brief moment and then on to the next stage of our development. It does not matter how many trials we have in life, just how we handle them. It does not matter how long we live, just how we live. How can we appreciate eternal good health if we have never experienced sickness, pain, or disease? How can we appreciate eternal joy if we have never experienced disappointment, hardship, or failure? How can we appreciate living forever if we have never known death?
Death | Disease | Earth | Eternal | Eternity | Failure | Good | Health | Joy | Life | Life | Pain | Time | Trials |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world.
Earth | History | Life | Life | Nature | Power | Present | Time | World |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
If justice prevails, good faith is found in treaties, truth in transaction, order in government, the earth is at peace, and heaven itself sheds overus its beneficent light and radiates down to us its blessed influence.
Earth | Faith | Good | Government | Heaven | Influence | Justice | Light | Order | Peace | Truth | Blessed |
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore.