This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
The love of a mother for her children is dominant, selfish and selfless at the same time.... The love of a father for his son or daughter is, if it is ever to love is a far-hearted, generous, moody and thoughtful gift giving without hope of reply, a farewell to a troubled wanderer wants to protect he likes, a properly weighed judgment about the strength and weakness, full of compassion for the failure, and full of pride to success.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
Aspiration | Duty | Human race | Instinct | Peace | Race | Responsibility | Sacrifice | Survival | War | Weapons | Work | Aspiration | Understand |
Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it.
The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.
Action | Courage | Death | Destroy | Experience | Hope | Instinct | Life | Life | Logic | Love | Man | Need | Order | Peace | Power | Question | Sense | Taste | War | Will | Wise | Work | World | Learn |
There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.
Decision | Eternal | God | Hope | Instinct | Life | Life | Man | Sense | Wholeness | Will | God | Happiness |
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
A Child Of God Longing To See Him Beloved - There's not an echo round me, But I am glad should learn, How pure a fire has found me, The love with which I burn. For none attends with pleasure To what I would reveal; They slight me out of measure, And laugh at all I feel. The rocks receive less proudly The story of my flame; When I approach, they loudly Reverberate his name. I speak to them of sadness, And comforts at a stand; They bid me look for gladness, And better days at hand. Far from all habitation, I heard a happy sound; Big with the consolation, That I have often found. I said, 'My lot is sorrow, My grief has no alloy; The rocks replied--'Tomorrow, Tomorrow brings thee joy.' These sweet and sacred tidings, What bliss it is to hear! For, spite of all my chidings, My weakness and my fear, No sooner I receive them, Than I forget my pain, And, happy to believe them, I love as much again. I fly to scenes romantic, Where never men resort; For in an age so frantic Impiety is sport. For riot and confusion They barter things above; Condemning, as delusion, The joy of perfect love. In this sequestered corner, None hears what I express; Delivered from the scorner, What peace do I possess! Beneath the boughs reclining, Or roving o'er the wild, I live as undesigning And harmless as a child. No troubles here surprise me, I innocently play, While Providence supplies me, And guards me all the day: My dear and kind defender Preserves me safely here, From men of pomp and splendour, Who fill a child with fear
Better | Chance | Good | History | Hope | Husband | Instinct | Nothing | Time | Wife | Afraid | Parent |
Regions Caesar never knew thy posterity shall sway; where his eagles never flew, none invincible as they. Such the bard's prophetic words, pregnant with celestial fire, bending as he swept the chords of his sweet but awful lyre.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by circa 1920.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943)
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!
Dirty | Instinct | Knowledge | Mystery | Reality | Soul | Spirit |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
I don't make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures.
Instinct |
No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”
Achievement | Culture | Instinct | Man | Morality | Time | Unity | Will | Work |