This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.
Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work - its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm's own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish. Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a landowner. He was the farm's farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.
Until we end our violence against the earth- a matter ignored by most pacifists, as the issue of military violence is ignored by most conservationists-how can we hope to end our violence against each other? The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants.
Despair | Enlightenment | Grief | Land | Man | Pride | Sense | Thought | World | Think | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last, Nurses to their graves are gone, But the prams go rolling on.
Age |
We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
We can start from where we are, with what we have, and imagine and work for the healings that are necessary. But we must begin by giving up any idea that we can bring about these healings without fundamental changes in the way we think and live. We face a choice that is starkly simple: we must change or be changed. If we fail to change for the better, then we will be changed for the worse.
We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
Ability | Arrogance | Behavior | Capacity | Change | Creativity | Danger | Doubt | Effort | Error | Good | Greed | Humility | Life | Life | Pride | Reverence | Sense | Will | World | Danger | Learn | Understand |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, in the position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Abstaining is favorable both to the head and the pocket.
Woman |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Few things in life are more embarrassing than the necessity of having to inform an old friend that you have just got engaged to his fiancée.
Love |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self - in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
Accomplishment | Honesty | Integrity | Virtue | Virtue |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
Customer: What have you in the way of steaks? WC: (I have) nothing in the way of steaks. I can get right to them.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Self, The Ego, and The Shadow operate in time and out of time. The ego operates almost exclusively in time. The Ego is the chief organ of Temporal Awareness.
Ability | Age | Enjoyment | Experience | Individual | Inspiration | Life | Life | Model | Mystery | People | Rest | Sense | Unique | Will | Work | Old |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is not such a simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn't--unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature so familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.
Attention | Contradiction | Dignity | Discovery | Habit | Innovation | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Mind | Reputation | Science | Society | Study | System | Terror | Theology | Thought | Time | Society | Discovery | Thought |