This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
As to what we call music in everyday language, to me architecture is music, gardening is music, farming is music, painting is music, poetry is music. In all the occupations of life where beauty has been the inspiration, where the divine wine has been poured out, there is music. But among all the different arts, the art of music has been specially considered divine, because it is the exact miniature of the law working through the whole universe. For instance, if we study ourselves we shall find that the beats of the pulse and the heart, the inhaling and exhaling of the breath are all the work of rhythm. Life depends upon the rhythmic working of the whole mechanism of the body. Breath manifests as voice, as word, as sound; and the sound is continually audible, the sound without and the sound within ourselves. That is music; it shows that there is music both outside and within ourselves.
Art | Beauty | Law | Life | Life | Music | Poetry | Sound | Study | Work | Art | Beauty |
Variety in poetry breeds self-indulgence; in gymnastics, disease: simplicity there puts temperance in the soul; here it puts health in the body.
Health | Poetry | Simplicity |
Whoever takes up Walt Whitman’s book as a student of Poetry alone, will not rightly understand it: many and many a line and passage will appear to him common, insignificant as a drop of water—has like that drop of water latent within it, power enough to furnish forth a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder if only it be taken up where the right conditions for liberating that force are present. I think he will one day win as ardent adhesion from men of science and philosophers, as from lovers of art, and they need him most of all.
Day | Enough | Force | Men | Need | Poetry | Power | Right | Science | Will | Think | Understand |
I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters of metre. But I know that the music is there, and that I would not for something change ears with those who cannot hear it. And I know that poetry must do one of two things,--either own this man as equal with her highest completest manifestors, or stand aside, and admit that there is something come into the world nobler, diviner than herself, one that is free of the universe, and can tell its secrets as none before.
We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands... searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living... for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
Courage | Fear | Important | Life | Life | Poetry | Respect | Struggle | Time | Trust | World | Respect |
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Mathematics | Poetry |
R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with "seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Poetry |
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts forever.
Experience | Poetry | Time |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
Age | Literature | Poetry |
I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby
Aid | Appearance | Books | Conversation | Deeds | Famous | History | Mathematics | Mind | Order | People | Philosophy | Poetry | Reading | Theology | Truth | Wealth | Worth | Deeds | Understand |
If music and sweet poetry agree, as they must needs (the sister and the brother), then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, because thou lov'st the one, and I the other.
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.
Aesthetic | Life | Life | Music | Passion | Poetry | Rank | Science | Time | Wonder | Worth |
There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.
The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the Latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Distinction | Poetry | Television |
One day while studying a [William Butler] Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life.
The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.
Mathematics | Poetry | Simplicity |
Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?