This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Unlike we are, unlike, O princely Heart! Unlike our uses and our destinies... Thou, bethink thee, art a guest for queens to social pageantries, with gages from a hundred brighter eyes than tears even can make mine... what hast though to do with looking from the lattice-lights at me, a poor, tired, wandering singer.
This world is a vaporous jest at best, tossed off by the gods in laughter, and a cruel attempt at wit were it, if nothing better came after.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher, when, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushed toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the Infinite? Art's life--and where we live, we suffer and toil.
Taste |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The world goes whispering to its own, "This anguish pierces to the bone;" and tender friends go sighing round, "What love can ever cure this wound?" My days go on, my days go on.
Worth |
A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe
As for keeping the attack dogs from nibbling away your courage? My theory, after decades in this business, is that you only give a few people the right to make you feel rotten. You have a handful of chits to give out, penuriously, to those you trust and respect. You don't give them to just anyone with an e-mail address and an epithet.
Battle | Children | Opposition | Parents | Time |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, to put on when you're weary or a stool to stumble over and vex you ... curse that stool! Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean and sleep, and dream of something we are not, but would be for your sake. Alas, alas! This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid the worth of our work, perhaps.
When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brain of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of 'thus saith the Lord.
All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.
To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.
The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man — the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more — is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.
Authority | Children | Father | Looks | Mother | Respect | Respect | Child |
Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse that brands and burdens; it is life and death. It is the great law of the universe; and nothing can exist without its breath.
Cause | Joy | Recompense |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good.