This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.
Acceptance | Charity | Grace | Humility | Love | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.
Day | Evil | Faith | Future | God | Hope | Life | Life | Nothing | Rank | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
Acceptance | Association | Atheism | Fear | God | Hope | People | Religion | Right | Superstition | Talking | Universe | Virtue | Virtue | Association | God |
We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
William P. Montague, fully William Pepperell Montague
Realism holds that things known may continue to exist unaltered when they are not known, or that things may pass in and out of the cognitive relation without prejudice to their reality, or that the existence of a thing is not correlated with or dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.
Difficulty | Meaning | Virtue | Virtue |
When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. ‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies.’ ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.’ ‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leapèd and shoutèd and laugh’d And all the hills echoèd.
Age | Doubt | Envy | Eternity | God | Gold | Good | Grave | Grief | Heaven | Hell | Innocence | Joy | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Little | Passion | Philosophy | Public | Revenge | Right | Soul | Teach | Truth | Woe | Woman | Words | World | Worth | God | Child | Old |
I love the jocund dance, The softly breathing song, Where innocent eyes do glance, And where lisps the maiden’s tongue. I love the laughing vale, I love the echoing hill, Where mirth does never fail, And the jolly swain laughs his fill. I love the pleasant cot, I love the innocent bow’r, Where white and brown is our lot, Or fruit in the mid-day hour. I love the oaken seat, Beneath the oaken tree, Where all the old villagers meet, And laugh our sports to see. I love our neighbours all, But, Kitty, I better love thee; And love them I ever shall; But thou art all to me.
Once a dream did weave a shade O’er my Angel-guarded bed, That an emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay. Troubled, ’wilder’d, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangled spray, All heart-broke I heard her say: ‘O, my children! do they cry? Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see: Now return and weep for me.’ Pitying, I dropp’d a tear; But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied: ‘What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night? ‘I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle’s hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home.’
Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce, And dost not know the garment from the man; Every harlot was a virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Tho’ thou art worship’d by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline, The lost traveller’s dream under the hill.
Darkness | Death | Doubt | Dreams | Eternal | Evil | Father | Good | Haste | Ignorance | Man | Shame | Virtue | Virtue |
Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure married in haste, we repent at leisure.
You throw the sand against the wind And the wind blows it back again.
Benevolence | Smile | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform he plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm. Deep in unfathomable mines of never failing skill he treasures up his bright designs, and works his sovereign will. Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, the clouds ye so much dread are big with mercy, and shall break in blessings on your head. Judge not the lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Time, animals, and buildings wear out with years, and submit to their hard lot. Time only meets with flat contradiction when he ventures to tell a woman that she is growing old.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | People | Unhappiness |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | Unhappiness |
Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.