This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let no youth have nay anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.
Vision |
Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a sweltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
Belief | Courage | Eternal | Light | Means | Nature | Need | Trust | Wisdom | World |
The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.
Better | Cheerfulness | Courage | Will |
So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
God | Individual | Partiality | Vision | God |
If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.
Vision |
Perfect valor is to behave, without witnesses, as one would act were all the world watching.
We often believe we are constant under misfortunes when we are only dejected; and we suffer then without daring to look on them, like cowards who allow themselves to be killed through fear of defending themselves.
One forgives to the degree that one loves.
Courage |
If you don't keep a close eye on your property, people will steal from you.
She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd; she is a woman, therefore may be won; she is Lavinia, therefore must be lov'd. What, man! more water glideth by the mill than wots the miller of; and easy it is of a cut loaf to steal a shive.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I seek no copy now of life's first half: leave here the pages with long musing curled, and write me new my future's epigraph, new angel mine, unhoped for in the world!
Melancholy | Vision |
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.