This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We should be determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.
Bigotry | Discussion | Disease | Education | Enthusiasm | Will |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.
Disease |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
The men who rise in the law are the men who decline to take No for an answer.
Disease |
Defeat is nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.
Disease | Government | Government |
The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger.
I’ve come down from the sky like some damned ghost, delayed too long…To the abandoned fields the trees returned and grew. They stand and grow. Time comes to them, time goes, the trees stand; the only place they go is where they are. Those wholly patient ones… They do no wrong, and they are beautiful. What more Could we have thought to ask?... I stand and wait for light to open the dark night. I stand and wait for prayer to come and find me here.
Cause | Disease | Individual | Motives | Order | People | Power | Success | Will | World |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of success and happiness: ONE WITH LIFE, being one with NOW. You don’t live your life, life lives you. Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The surface mind is like a dinghy on a vast sea. Dreams are the dimension for initiation and awakenings. Revelations, healing, or the reflection of a potential healing show up in dreams. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position because one surrenders the surface mind’s preferential viewpoint and goes into letting the dream reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of the vaster nature is. Denied aspects by the surface psyche are cast into the unconscious where they live their material and influence not only us but others as well, whether we are conscious of it or not. The ego can’t project, it can’t cast out, it is predominantly a witness. What you think are your resources, and who and what you think you are is really a mask, and it precludes your seeing the authentic being. The whole development in the second half of life is to discover the authentic being and to release the defenses, and the masks, and meeting other people’s expectations. We begin to explore the mystery of natural beingness which is a very strange things for human beings – we have to be trained back into it.
Body | Disease | Energy | Experience | Life | Life | Love | Nature |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Vast tribes of savages, who had always been idolaters, who were perfectly incapable, from their low state of civilization, of forming any but anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, or of concentrating their attention steadily on any invisible object, and who for the most part were converted not by individual persuasion but by the commands of their chiefs, embraced Christianity in such multitudes that their habits of mind soon became the dominating habits of the Church. From this time the tendency to idolatry was irresistible. The old images were worshipped under new names, and one of the most prominent aspects of the Apostolical teaching was in practice ignored.
Age | Agony | Disease | Eternal | Happy | Heart | Pride | Purity | Remorse | Shame | Society | World | Society | Think |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that. V.