This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Society is a wall of very strong masonry, as it now stands; it may be sapped in the course of a thousand years, but stormed in a day - no! You dash your head against it - you scatter your brains, and you dislodge a stone. Society smiles in scorn, effaces the stain, and replaces the stone.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, and receives new truth as an angel for Heaven.
The mind in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
Body | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Light | Mind | Nature | Revelation | Wisdom |
Edgar Cayce, known as the "Sleeping Prophet"
For, he that expects nothing shall not be disappointed, but he that expects much - if he lives and uses that in hand every day - shall be full to running over.
They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections - we must chew them over again.
Enough | Knowledge | Mind | Reading | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought | Understand |
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.
Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind | Wisdom |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Those two fatal words, Mind and Thine..."Do not forget, Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "that there are two kinds of beauty, one being of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul is revealed through intelligence, modesty, right conduct, generosity, and good breeding, all of which qualities may exist in an ugly man; and when one's gaze is fixed upon beauty of this sort and not upon that of the body, love is usually born suddenly and violently."
Beauty | Body | Conduct | Generosity | Good | Intelligence | Love | Man | Mind | Modesty | Qualities | Right | Soul | Ugly | Wisdom | Words | Beauty |
The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven.
Angels | Glory | God | Habit | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Power | Sensibility | Soul | Wisdom | World | God | Happiness |
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
Sickness and disease are in weak minds the sources of melancholy; but that which is painful to the body, may be profitable to the soul. Sickness puts us in mind of our mortality, and, while we drive on heedlessly in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, kindly pulls us by the ear, and brings us to a proper sense of duty.
Body | Disease | Duty | Melancholy | Mind | Sense | Soul | Wisdom |
Before you think of retiring from the world, be sure you are fit for retirement; in order to which it is necessary that you have a mind so composed by prudence, reason, and religion, that it may bear being looked into; a turn to rural life, and a love of study.
Life | Life | Love | Mind | Order | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Retirement | Study | Wisdom | World | Think |
Getters generally don't get happiness; givers get it. You simply give to others a bit of yourself - a thoughtful act, a helpful idea, a word of appreciation., a lift over a rough spot, a sense of understanding, a timely suggestion. You take something out of your mind, garnished in kindness out of your heart, and put it into the other fellow's mind and heart.
Appreciation | Heart | Kindness | Mind | Sense | Understanding | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania, when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank, oh, then diet yourself well on biography - the biography of good and great men.
Diet | Good | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Sorrow | Wisdom |
Literature is "The expression of a nation's mind in writing."
Literature | Mind | Wisdom | Writing |