This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let us appeal to ourselves, whether we are not more unwilling to secret, closet, hearty duty to God, than to join with others in some external service; as if those inward services were a going to the rack, and rather our penance than privilege. How much service hath God in the world from the same principle that vagrants perform their task in Bridewell! How glad are many of evasions to back them in the neglect of the commands of God, of corrupt reasonings from the flesh to waylay an act of obedience, and a multitude of excuses to blunt the edge of the precept!
Cause | Force | Heart | Law | Man | Nature | Principles | Will | Writing | Friends |
Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns,
Aside from the moral contamination incident to the average theatre, the influence intellectually is degrading. Its lessons are morbid, distorted, and superficial; they do not mirror life.
Discipline | Mind | Reading | Think |
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
It is a difficult matter to gain the affection of a cat. He is a philosophical, methodical animal, tenacious of his own habits, fond of order and neatness, and disinclined to extravagant sentiment. He will be your friend, if he finds you worthy of friendship, but not your slave.
Custom | Enjoyment | God | Good | Life | Life | Love | Reading | Rest | Reward | Sense | Soul | Thought | God | Privilege | Thought |
Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight in external beauty!
We've been caught up in a mechanistic world, because what we make, makes us. We make the automobile, the automobile makes us. We make an industrial economy, the industrial economy makes us. We are now in a weird dream world of industrial technological imagination. Who would be so destructive to the very basis out of which we exist, that we spoil our water and our air? For what? To invent an industrial economy. We are so brilliant scientifically and so absurd in any other way. We are into a deep cultural pathology -- in ordinary language, we are crazy. To think that we can have a viable human economy by destroying the Earth economy is absurd.
Consciousness | Earth | Glory | People | Perfection | Reading | Relationship | Rights | Universe |
It is the first of all problems for a man (or woman) to find out what kind of work he (or she) is to do in this universe.
There is often more spiritual force in a proverb than in whole philosophical systems.
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, Man.
Imagination | Impression | Man | Memory | Mind | Object | Reading | Time |
A man has a right to use a saw, an axe, a plane, separately; may he not combine their uses on the same piece of wood? He has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject? Such a law, instead of enlarging our conveniences, as was intended, would most fearfully abridge them, and crowd us by monopolies out of the use of the things we have.
No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.
The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied... Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.
Reading |
My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ[.]
Government | History | Reading | Government |
My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.
Reading |