This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other
Experience | Life | Life | Think |
I distinguish three sorts of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas.
Distinction | Distinguish | Experience | Impression | Play | Rest |
This devalues the experience of suffering.
Enthusiasm | Experience | Inclination | Little |
It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing — ambiguity is a fact of life.
Experience | Journey | Respect | Time | Respect |
If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. There must be an organic unity between past and future lived in the present.
Experience | Feelings | Heart | Little | Need | Past | People | Will | Work | Value |
You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.
IÂ’m a short-story writer who writes novels the hard way, and by accident. You see, all my work grows out of the work itself. It seems to set its form from the idea, which is complete from the start, and a sense of the form is like a vase into which you pour something and fill it up. I have that completely in mind from the beginning, and I donÂ’t realize how far I can wander and yet come back.
Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. If we thought about it for two consecutive minutes, we would not want it that way. If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do.
The kind human gain much that that the virtue was less laborious.
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
Children | Experience | Wisdom | Old |
None of us can help the things life has done to us. TheyÂ’re done before you realize it, and once theyÂ’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what youÂ’d like to be, and youÂ’ve lost your true self forever.
Contempt | Experience | Father |
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.
Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
Death | Equanimity | Eternal | Evil | Fear | Grace | Life | Life | Men | Reward | Will |
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy.)
I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgment can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.
It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.
Experience | Time |