This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Who can think of the sun costuming clouds when all people are shaken or of night endazzled, proud, when people awaken and cry and cry for help?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Absence | Personality | Simplicity | Temper |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. You call that organization? he had inquired. You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing? This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other, the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.
Compassion is an emotion of which we ought never to be ashamed. Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe. We should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in a selfish enjoyment; but we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human, life, of the solitary cottage; the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty. Hugh Blair
From reading the most admired productions of genius, whether in poetry or prose, almost every one rises with some good impressions left on his mind; and though these may not always be durable, they are at least to be ranked among the means of disposing the heart to virtue. One thing is certain, that without possessing the virtuous affections in a strong degree, no man can attain eminence in the sublime parts of eloquence. He must feel what a good man feels, if he expects greatly to move or to interest mankind. They are the ardent sentiments of honour, virtue, magnanimity, and public spirit, that only can kindle that fire of genius, and call up into the mind those high ideas which attract the admiration of ages; and if this spirit be necessary to produce the most distinguished efforts of eloquence, it must be necessary also to our relishing them with proper taste and feeling.
Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night, give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun. Romeo and Juliet, Act iii, Scene 2
Fault | Means | Mother | Receive | Shame | Temper | Will | Words | Fault | Guilty |
My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.
Confidence | Temper |
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
There is a grace in wild variety surpassing rule and order.
Inconvenient | Love | Spirit | Temper |
Though the light and comfort of the outward world keeps even the worst men from any constant strong sensibility of that wrathful, fiery, dark and self-tormenting nature that is the very essence of every fallen unregenerate soul, yet every man in the world has more or less frequent and strong intimations given him that so it is with him in the inmost ground of his soul. How many inventions are some people forced to have recourse to in order to keep off a certain inward uneasiness, which they are afraid of and know not whence it comes? Alas, it is because there is a fallen spirit, a dark, aching fire, within them, which has never had its proper relief and is trying to discover itself and calling out for help at every cessation of worldly joy.
Devotion | Means | Piety | Spirit | Temper | Wisdom | World |
You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it.
Evil | God | Good | Love | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Revenge | Sin | Temper | Vengeance | Work | God |
Oh, plain, and easy, and simple way of salvation! Wanting no subtleties of art or science, no borrowed learning, no refinements of reason; but all done by the simple natural motion of every heart that truly longs after God. For no sooner is the finite desire of the creature in motion towards God, but the infinite desire of God is united with it, co-operates with it; and in this united desire of God and the creature is the salvation and life of the soul brought forth.
Inconvenient | Love | Spirit | Temper | Will |
It has become a conviction with me that psychology may in the long run do much to change the conception of the fundamental nature of the religious life, which, on the whole, is now too generally made a matter of doctrine. It is too intellectual At the doors of most churches one is met by required beliefs in a particular conception of God, in a speculative theory about the divinity of Christ, definite ideas concerning sin and salvation, the efficacy of ordinances, and the claims of supernatural revelation. What people are really seeking is access to refreshing fountains of life, sources of strength and guidance. They crave association with people and institutions which may convey to them a sense of what is most worthwhile in life and what may furnish impulsion toward real and enduring values. They know pretty well what those values are when allowed to let their own deepest desires express themselves.
Beginning | Divinity | Excitement | History | Meaning | Metaphysics | Philosophy | Revelation | Science | Temper | Theology | Thought | Work | Thought |
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.
In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.
Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |