This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike. The men who returned from the third attempt to climb Mount Everest, made in the summer of 1924, have told us that from now on the character of the endeavor is clearly defined in advance. One of them has recently said that the higher altitudes, from 22,000 to 28,000 feet, reached by the last party, were attained not by sportsmen and scientists breaking the mountain to their intention, but by men who had come to feel towards the mountain an almost mystical relationship. He said that the mountain itself, with its tremendous appeal, must take men to the top, and that only a spirit, which for the want of any other accurate word must be called religion, would ever carry men the last exacting two thousand feet. What he seems to mean is that, in the presence of that imperious and majestic reality, the cheap coercive attempt to conquer the world must always break down, and that only something like the spirit of worship can draw and lift men at the last. The climbing of Mount Everest has ceased to be purely a geographical, political, and physiological problem. It has passed, as every great human endeavor must finally pass, into the realm of religion. And only the man whose peace is found in the imperious will of that terrific reality will ever stand upon its summit. After he had dragged the blankets out of the empty tent at Camp VI, high up on the shoulder of Everest, and had laid them in a “T” on the snow to tell the watchers below that there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine, Odell closed the flap of the tent and began the third retreat to India. “I glanced up,” he says, “at the mighty summit above me, which ever and anon deigned to reveal its cloud-wreathed features. It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and to howl derision in wind gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—the mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess, or much more to sling at her our blasphemous challenges. If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomo Lungma—the Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows—had we violated it, was I now violating it? Had we approached her with due reverence and singleness of heart and purpose?” That, in modern parable, is the crux of the temptation in the wilderness. Magic in us dies and religion is born with that question which, if rightly answered, prefaces the true reference of the soul to God. What right have I to make trial of my God? Have I violated his holy being with my self-will? Have I approached him with due reverence and singleness of mind and heart?
Bible | Commerce | Defeat | Disillusionment | Eternal | God | Health | Heart | Idleness | Lord | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Religion | Right | Spirit | Story | Struggle | Temper | Temptation | Universe | Will | World | Commerce | God | Bible | Old | Temptation |
Love to faults is always blind; Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind. Deceit to secrecy confin’d, Lawful, cautious and refin’d; To anything but interest blind, And forges fetters for the mind.
Benevolence | Burial | Divinity | Enemy | God | Man | Marriage | Men | Murder | Receive | Smile | Time | Will | Wishes | Worship | Friendship | God | Murder | Forgive | Friends |
The Holiness of Minute Particulars - And many conversèd on these things as they labour’d at the furrow, Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery; It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.… He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!
Family | Good | Harmony | Land | Lord | Love | Man | Vengeance | Forgive |
The humblest and the most unseen activity in the world can be the true worship of God. Work and worship literally become one. Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever; and man carries out that function when he does what God sent him into the world to do. Work well done rises like a hymn of praise to God. This means that the doctor on his rounds, the scientist in his laboratory, the teacher in his classroom, the musician at his music, the artist at his canvas, the shop assistant at his counter, the typist at her typewriter, the housewife in her kitchen -- all who are doing the work of the world as it should be done are joining in a great act of worship.
Discipline | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man | Prayer | Service | Study | Suspicion | Will |
It is in your character of Prime Minister that I take the liberty of prefixing your Lordship's name to this “Tale of Irish Famine”. Had Sir Robert Peel been in office, I would have placed his name where that of your Lordship now stands. There is something not improper in this; for although I believe that both you and he are sincerely anxious to benefit our unhappy country, still I cannot help thinking that the man who in his ministerial capacity, must be looked upon as a public exponent of those principals of Government which have brought our country to her present calamitous condition, by a long course of illiberal legislation and unjustifiable neglect, ought to have his name placed before a story which details with truth the sufferings which such legislation and neglect have entailed upon our people.
Example | Literature | Man | Men | Thought | Truth | Wealth | World | Talent | Thought |
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy and in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain it is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun and in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn it is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted to speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer to listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season when the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs it is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements to hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan; to see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemies' house; to rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness that cuts off his children while our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door and our children bring fruits and flowers then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten and the slave grinding at the mill and the captive in chains and the poor in the prison and the soldier in the field when the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead it is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Have you ever heard of such a thing as the fascination of terror?
Man |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
I guess the only way to stop divorce is to stop marriage.
Right | World | Understand |
As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.
Intelligence | Land | Story | Time | Tradition |
My discovery of the Life Energy is today widely known nearly all over the globe, in hundreds of institutions, whether acclaimed or cursed. It can no longer be stopped by anyone, no matter what happens to me.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that set the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion. Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know--the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More importantly, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe--that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and has been replaced by man's monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.
Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.
Design |
A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
Good | Human nature | Nature | Necessity |