This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Temperament we are born with, character we have to make; and that not in the grand moments... but in the daily, quiet paths of pilgrimage.
Barry Cornwall, pseudonymn for Bryan Waller Procter
Death is the tyrant of the imagination. His reign is in solitude and darkness, in tombs and prisons, over weak hearts and seething brains. He lives, without shape or sound, a phantasm, inaccessible to sight or touch - a ghastly and terrible apprehension.
Character | Darkness | Death | Imagination | Solitude | Sound | Wisdom |
In cities no one is quiet but many are lonely; in the country, people are quiet but few are lonely.
Madame de Lambert, fully Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert
We cheat ourselves in order to enjoy a quiet conscience, without possessing virtue.
Albertus Magnus, known as Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne
Happy is the man who, by continually effacing all images and through introversion and the lifting up of his mind to God, at last forgets and leaves behind all such hindrances... If, therefore, thou desirest a safe stair and short path to arrive at the end of true bliss, then, with an intent mind, earnestly desire and aspire after continual cleanness of heart and purity of mind. Add to this a constant calm and tranquillity of the senses, and a recollecting of the affections of the heart, continually fixing them above. Work to simplify the heart, that being immovable and at peace from any invading vain phantasms... Thus continue, until thou becomest immutable and dost arrive at any vicissitude of space or time, reposing in that inward quiet and secret mansion of the deity.
Character | Desire | God | Happy | Heart | Man | Mind | Peace | Purity | Quiet | Safe | Space | Time | Tranquility | Work |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Who are happy in marriage? Those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.
Better | Character | Happy | Imagination | Little | Marriage | Quiet | Rebellion | Slavery |
The contemplative life has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart... you will truly recover the light and capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanation because it is too close to be explained.
Capacity | Character | Fear | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Silence | Solitude | Will | Words | Understand |
A moral decision is the loneliest thing that exists. Knowledge is shed abroad everywhere. Anybody may dip his cup into that great sea and take out what he can. It is a public appropriation from a public store. But what the man himself must do as a moral being, what ordering he shall make of his life, what allegiance he shall choose, what cause he shall cleave to - this is decided in that solitude where his soul in authentic presence lives with no other companion than the Final Authority which he recognizes as supreme.
Authority | Cause | Character | Decision | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Public | Solitude | Soul |
Solitary we must be in life's great hours of moral decisions; solitary in pain and sorrow; solitary in old age and in our going forth at death. Fortunate the man who has learned what to do in solitude and brought himself to see what companionship he may discover in it, what fortitude, what content.
Age | Character | Death | Fortitude | Life | Life | Man | Old age | Pain | Solitude | Sorrow | Companionship | Old |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.
Character | Courage | Death | Fortune | Grace | Mind | Peril | Quiet | Strength | Friends |