This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason - for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons- sometimes out of pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish.
Unlike many girlfriends I did not feel any painful longing sight of young children. (True, I felt the painful longing when they see a good used book shop.)
Wisdom |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
I pray to God that I shall not live one hour after I have thought of using deception.
You cannot prove to yourself that you love God by examining your feelings toward Him. They are indefinite and they fluctuate. But just as far as you obey Him, just so far, depend upon it; you love Him. It is not natural to us sinful, ungrateful beings to prefer His pleasure to our own or to follow His way instead of our own way, and nothing, nothing but love of Him can or does make us obedient to Him.
Body | Leisure | Little | Music | Recreation | Sacrifice | Soul | Will | Worth |
With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
Authority | Will | Understand |
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.
Absolute | Attainment | Labor | Means | Nature | Sacrifice | Woman | Worth |
There is a haunting phantom called Regret, a shadowy creature robed somewhat like woe, but fairer in the face, whom all men know by her said mien, and eyes forever wet. No heart would seek her; but once having met all take her by the hand, and to and fro they wander through those paths of long ago-- those hallowed ways 'twere wiser to forget.
The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man — the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more — is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.
Authority | Children | Father | Looks | Mother | Respect | Respect | Child |
From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. I shall never meet myself again, he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate - in his forgiveness - all beings, all things.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
No ship takes us to distant lands better than a book.
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Authority | Conscience | Doubt | Fear | Justice | Knowledge | Position | Public | Responsibility | Struggle | Terror | Guilty | Understand |