This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The people often slandered as greedy geezers seem to have a perspective from their place in history. The elders in my family remember the Depression. The baby boomers remember dot-com boom and bust. We all have albums of best laid plans.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
He knows so little and knows it so fluently.
Earth | Force | Man | Mind | Revelation |
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.
Mind |
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.
Mind |
An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
There is granted to everyone after death the opportunity of amending his life, if it is at all possible.
Earnestness | Mind | Power | Spirit | Work |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.
Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire... the last "primitives" in Europe.
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
Mind |
I am not even talking about the way the judges were hand-picked. Doesn't the overriding idea of discipline, which is the lifeblood of these soldiers, itself undercut their capacity for fairness? Discipline means obedience. When the Minister of War, the commander in chief, proclaims, in public and to the acclamation of the nation's representatives, the absolute authority of a previous verdict, how can you expect a court martial to rule against him?
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
A little Madness in the Spring is wholesome even for the King.
Immortality | Mind |