This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.
Government | Important | Peace | People | Rights | Government |
Industry is a Christian obligation, imposed on our race to develop the noblest energies, and insures the highest reward.
Some must watch while some must sleep, so runs the world away.
So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"For if I wait," said she, "Till time for roses be,-- for the moss-rose and the musk-rose, maiden-blush and royal-dusk rose,-- “What glory then for me in such a company?-- Roses plenty, roses plenty and one nightingale for twenty?"
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...
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.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.
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.
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?
We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.
Misfortune | Misfortune |