This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are angels near you to guide you and protect you, if you would but invoke them. It is not later than we think, it is a bigger world than we think.
The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct.
Asceticism | Asceticism | Happiness |
If all things in this universe exist, it is because they participate in the Being of God, if there are some things with life, it is because they are reflections of the life of God; if there are beings endowed with intellect and will — like men and angels — it's because they are a participation of the Sovereign Intellect which is God.
Faith from its essential nature implies the fallen state of man, while it recognizes the principles of the covenant of grace. It is itself the condition of that covenant. It is a grace which is alike distinguished from the love of angels and the faith of devils. It is peculiar to the returning sinntr. None but a lost sinner needs it; none but a humbled sinner relishes it.
Not by appointment do we meet delight Or joy; they heed not our expectancy; But round some corner of the streets of life they of a sudden greet us with a smile.
The gentleman trains his eyes so that they desire only to see what is right, his ears so that they desire to hear only what is right, his mind so that it desires to think only what is right. When he has truly learnt to love what is right, his eyes will take greater pleasure in it than in the fine colours; his ears will take greater pleasure than in the fine sounds; his mouth will take greater pleasure than in the fine flavours; and his mind will feel keener delight than in possession of the world. When he has reached this stage, he cannot be subverted by power or the love of profit. He cannot be swayed by the masses. He cannot be moved by the world. He follows this one thing in life; he follows it in death. This is what is called constancy of virtue.
Constancy | Desire | Love | Mind | Pleasure | Power | Will | Think |
This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.
Care | Circumstances | Debt | Sorrow | World |
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
If you expect anything out of love, or meditation, you will get only frustration, and negative emptiness will happen. If you love for the sheer joy of it, if you meditate for the sheer delight of it and you don't have any result in mind -- you are not goal-oriented -- then there comes an emptiness which is positive. You start feeling full. You start feeling, for the first time, that you ARE. Being is felt, and that being is tremendously beautiful, blissful. It is SATCHITANANDA: it is existence, it is consciousness, it is bliss.
Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are... The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves, it is our very self. Man is manacled only by himself: thought and action are the jailers of Fate - they imprison, being base; they are also the angels of Freedom - they liberate, being noble. Not what a man wishes and prays for does a man get, but what he justly earns.
Action | Angels | Fate | Freedom | Man | Thought | Wishes | Fate | Thought |
I can think of only two good criteria [for whether an item is worth knowing]: Whether the knowledge gives a sense of delight and whether it bestows the gift of intellectual travel beyond the information given.
The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night's heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God.
Angels | Day | Evil | Heart | Language | Life | Life | Light | Little | Pain | Pity | Sorrow | World | Wrong |
Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its end is despair.
Goodness and virtue make men know and love, believe and delight in their immortality. When the soul is purged and enlightened by true sanctity, it is more capable of those divine irradiations, whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God. It knows that almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death.
An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it.
What is commonly called conservation will not work in the long run because it is not really conservation at all but rather, disguised by its elaborate scheming, only a more knowledgeable variation of the old idea of a world for man's use only. That idea is unrealizable. But how can man be persuaded to cherish any other ideal unless he can learn to take some interest and some delight in the beauty and variety of the world for its own sake, unless he can see a value in a flower blooming or an animal at play, unless he can see some use in things not useful?
Beauty | Conservation | Man | Will | Work | World | Beauty | Learn | Old | Value |
To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
Child |
As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.