This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written.
Age | Beauty | Bible | Books | History | Important | Language | Morality | Poetry | Bible |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art... Great poetry may be made without direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely... It is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, to so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.
Art | Emotions | Experience | Feelings | Greatness | Poetry | Work | Art |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
I believe in work, hard work and long hours of work. Men do not break down from overwork, but from worry and dissipation.
PAC [Political Action Committee] money is destroying the electoral process. It feeds the growth of special interest groups created solely to channel money into political campaigns. It creates an impression that every candidate is bought and owned by the biggest givers.
Action | Growth | Impression | Money |
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.
Blessings | Earth | Growth | Land | Man | Mystery | Nature | People | Think |
Because of the law of gravitation the apple falls to the ground. Because of the law of growth the acorn becomes a mighty oak. Because of the law of causation a man is as he thinketh in his heart. Nothing can happen without its adequate cause.
18/40/60 Rule When you're eighteen, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you. When you're forty, you don't give a damn about what anybody thinks of you. When you're sixty, you realize nobody's been thinking about you at all.
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
Beauty | Philosophy | Poetry | Beauty |
Elizabeth Drew, aka Elizabeth Brenner
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
Conversation | Wit | Worry |