This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire uttered and expressed, the motion of a hidden fire that trembles in the breast. Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear, the upward glancing of an eye, when none but God are near. Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try, prayer, the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on high.
With what astonishment and veneration may we look into our own souls, where there are such hidden stores of virtue and knowledge, such inexhaustible sources of perfection. We know not yet what we shall be, nor will it ever enter into the heart to conceive the glory that will be always in reserve for it.
Glory | Heart | Knowledge | Perfection | Reserve | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
Truth has many shells. Each is the truth, but each represents a different aspect, depending on the bias, self-interest, or other psychological coloration which remains on the surface. As one after another shell is removed, the picture of truth changes. Only if one can reach the core, hidden beneath the protective covering, does one feel he knows the bare truth.
Self | Self-interest | Truth |
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the good ness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life.
Beauty | Despair | Earth | Eternal | God | Good | Happy | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Sorrow | Spirit | Will | Worship | Beauty | Learn |
Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.
The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.
Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation.
Ambition | Little | Man | Mind | Mortal | Patience | Pleasure |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
Nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting point for a fresh development.
Discovery | Humility | Nature | Nothing | Suffering | World | Discovery |
‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Books | Good | Heart | Mind | Passion | Sensibility | Thought | Thought |
The soul that flows out into God does not die; death is alien to what is submerged in life. The soul is alive, but not to itself. Stars are ever giving light, but they do not shine in the daytime; the sun shines in them, and they are hidden away in the sun’s rays. So it is with the soul; still alive, but now its life is bound up with God; or rather, it is God who lives in it.
Prayer is called mystical, because of the hidden nature of the conversation: God and the individual speak heart to heart, and what passes between them can be shared with no one else.
Conversation | God | Heart | Individual | Mystical | Nature | Prayer | God |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one.
Beginning | Children | Earth | Heart | Simplicity | Time | Will |
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.