This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.
Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart.
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, brief as the lightning in the collied night, that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, — Behold! The jaws of darkness do devour it up: so quick bright things come to confusion.
Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Beauty | Excellence | Experience | Pleasure | Trust | Will | World | Excellence | Beauty |
I want to have a lasting experience of God, I told him. Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears.
The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
Appreciation | Pleasure | Appreciation |
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
There's one sad truth in life I've found while journeying east and west - the only folks we really wound are those we love the best. We flatter those we scarcely know, we please the fleeting guest, and deal full many a thoughtless blow to those who love us best.
Pleasure |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.
Peace | Pleasure | Friendship |
You think you're frightening me with your hell, don't you? You think Yyur hell is worse than mine.
Books | Giving | Literature | Present | Trial |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
A soft Sea washed around the House a Sea of Summer Air and rose and fell the magic Planks that sailed without a care — for Captain was the Butterfly for Helmsman was the Bee and an entire universe for the delighted crew.
Dreams | Knowledge | Literature | Pleasure | Old |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
No coward soul is mine, no trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, and Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear. O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life — that in me has rest, as I — undying Life — have power in Thee! Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts: unutterably vain; worthless as withered weeds, or idlest froth amid the boundless main.