This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
In judging myself I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be. Measuring myself by that standard I must exclaim with Surdas: ' Where is there a wretch So wicked and loathsome as I? I have forsaken my Maker, So faithless have I been.' For it is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from him, who, as I fully know, governs every breath of my life, and whose offspring I am. I know that it is the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them.
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
With a double vigilance should we watch our actions, when we reflect that good and bad ones are never childless, and that in both cases the offspring goes beyond the parent,--every good begetting a better, every bad a worse.
The sensitive eye can never be able to survey, the orb of the sun, unless strongly endued with solar fire, and participating largely of the vivid ray. Everyone therefore must become divine, and of godlike beauty, before he can gaze upon a god and the beautiful itself. Thus proceeding in the right way of beauty he will first ascend into the region of intellect, contemplating every fair species, the beauty of which he will perceive to be no other than ideas themselves; for all things are beautiful by the supervening irradiations of these, because they are the offspring and essence of intellect. But that which is superior to these is no other than the fountain of good, everywhere widely diffusing around the streams of beauty, and hence in discourse called the beautiful itself because beauty is its immediate offspring. But if you accurately distinguish the intelligible objects you will call the beautiful the receptacle of ideas; but the good itself, which is superior, the fountain and principle of the beautiful; or, you may place the first beautiful and the good in the same principle, independent of the beauty which there subsists.
Beauty | Distinguish | God | Good | Ideas | Right | Will | Beauty | God |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Forget thy affliction, and cease supplication, Recall thy release from Egyptian rod, The hand is not short that hath laid earth’s foundation, Who stretched out the heavens remaineth thy God. And at thy due season the glory that dwelleth In Zion shall rest on thy head that great day, When moonlight as sunlight in radiance welleth And sunlight shall glow with a sevenfold ray.
Mother |
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco
The art of victory is learned in defeat.
We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading positive attitude protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.
Freedom |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
And of the rights of them the others are down upon, of the deformed, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. Through me forbidden voices, voices of sexes and lusts, voices veiled and I remove the veil, voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
How could sufferings be relieved through purification? To know the Path is to get lost at the ford. Indeed, sickness comes from worldly love And poverty begins with the pursuit of greed.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant.
W. Winwood Reade, fully William Winwood Reade
As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Let us go singing as far as we go the road will be less tedious.
The greatness of democracy is that it denies nothing and renounces nothing of humanity. Next to the rights of Man, side by side with them, at least, are the rights of the Soul.
Man |
The whirring of the bowstring and the drums shall shout at the directions where the conquered armies of the enemies go in successive ranks.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.