This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is the laughter which is born out of the pure joy of living, the spontaneous expression of health and energy - the secret laughter of the child. This is a gift of God. There is the warm laughter of the kindly soul which heartens the discouraged, gives health to the sick and comfort to the dying... There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter that triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Comfort | Energy | Eternal | Excellence | God | Health | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature - takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, vis.: the mind and soul of man.
Art | Intention | Man | Mind | Nature | Soul | Study | Wisdom |
John Bowring, fully Sir John Bowring
He that studies to know duty, and labors in all things to do it, will have two heavens - one of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and the other of glory and happiness beyond the grave.
Comfort | Duty | Earth | Glory | Grave | Joy | Peace | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Those two fatal words, Mind and Thine..."Do not forget, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "that there are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, generosity, and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; and when one's gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, love is usually born suddenly and violently."
Beauty | Body | Conduct | Generosity | Good | Intelligence | Love | Man | Mind | Modesty | Qualities | Right | Soul | Ugly | Wisdom | Words | Beauty |
The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven.
Angels | Glory | God | Habit | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Power | Sensibility | Soul | Wisdom | World | God | Happiness |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterward.
Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood, the courses in which it moves.
The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.
Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
Reality, union with reality, is the true state of the soul when confident and healthy. Unreality is what keeps us from ourselves, and most pleasures are unreal.