This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Authority | Government | Growth | Peace | Principles | Safe | Time | Government |
The Creator has not thought proper to mark those in the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold, and then let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses.
Government | Safe | Government |
It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that we can and should develop our spiritual union with God.
Gentleness | Love | Silence | Solitude | Teach |
When men's intents are wicked, their guilt haunts them, but when they are just they're arm'd, and nothing daunts them.
Truth |
In thus choosing the womb door, there is always danger of erring. Under the influence of evolution, you might see an excellent womb door as bad. You might see a bad womb door as excellent. So here the key instruction for choosing is important; do as follows: Even if a womb door appears to be excellent, do not become attached to it. Even if it appears bad, do not become averse to it. Enter it within the experience of the universal loving equanimity, free of lust and hate and compulsive choosing between good and bad. This is the authentic profound key instruction.
Parenting is a spiritual path which can bring great pain and great joy and which can have a tremendous positive impact on your personality and behavior. I believe our children, unknowingly and with innocent trickery, teach us the deeper knowledge of how to be a true human being.
Consciousness | Gentleness | Love | Mother | Wise |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Funeral Blues - Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeropanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good
Dread | Earth | Indifference | Little | Man | Passion | Learn | Think |
There are times when minds need to turn to simple things. Perhaps for a few of these nights all of us might do well to leave the briefcases at the office and to read again the pages of the Bible, and to re-read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. We might do well to stay home a few days and walk over the fields, or to stand in the shelter of the barn door and reflect upon the relentless and yet benevolent forces of Mother Nature. The laws of nature are relentless. They can never be disobeyed without exacting a penalty. Yet they are benevolent, for when they are understood and obeyed, nature yields up the abundance that blesses those who understand and obey.
Children | Freedom | Good | Happy | Honor | Industry | Labor | Land | Liberty | Magic | Men | Miracles | People | Work | World |
Slaves cannot breathe in England if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free they touch our country, and their shackles fall.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
How easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world.
Boys | Curiosity | Misfortune | Nothing | Youth | Misfortune | Youth |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Family |
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement I knew when I was a kid.
Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom.
Capacity | Danger | Foresight | Mind | Power | Psychoanalysis | Strength | Danger |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Oh, a strange hand writes for our dear son--O, stricken mother's soul! All swims before her eyes--flashes with black--she catches the main words only; sentences broken--gun-shot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital; at present low, but will soon be better.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, straight and swift to my wounded I go, where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground, or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital, to the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, to each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss, an attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.