This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I was a poet who wrote an autobiography poetic without ceasing to beat at the gates of the impossible. I would not dare to speak of myth in my poetry, but there is a desire to question life. At the beginning I was skeptical, influenced by Schopenhauer . But in my verses of maturity I tried to hope, to beat the wall, to see what could be the other side of the wall, convinced that life has a meaning that escapes us. I knocked desperately as one who waits for a response.
If we look into the history of our own nation, we shall find that the beard flourished in the Saxon heptarchy, but was very much discouraged under the Norman line. It shot out, however, from time to time, in several reigns under different shapes. The last effort it made seems to have been in Queen MaryÂ’s days, as the curious reader may find, if he pleases to peruse the figures of Cardinal Pole and Bishop Gardiner; though, at the same time, I think it may be questioned, if zeal against popery has not induced our Protestant painters to extend the beards of these two persecutors beyond their natural dimensions, in order to make them appear the more terrible.
Action | Censure | Man | Reflection |
His tawny beard was thÂ’ equal grace both of his wisdom and his face; in cut and dye so like a tile, a sudden view it would beguile; the upper part thereof was whey, the nether, orange mixt with gray.
When you have gained a victory, do not push it too far; 'tis sufficient to let the company and your adversary see 'tis in your power but that you are too generous to make use of it.
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
There is no bitterness to be compared with that between two people who once loved.
When a man's stomach is full it makes no difference whether he is rich or poor.
A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.
Man |
Joint undertakings stand a better chance when they benefit both sides.
Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.
At the inner circle of the disciples and friends of the Cross - composed mostly of men representing the official culture (school, universities, academies) I never belonged. But instead, I breathed the air of other environments where the teaching of the Cross had penetrated inland perhaps indirect.