This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough. King Lear, Act iv, Scene 1
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Discretion is the better part of valour. [The better part of valour is discretion.] Henry IV, Part I, Act v, Scene 4
Take heed thou makest not the least child thine enemy by offering wrong to him; God will right the wicked even upon the saint.
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Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
Caution | Conversation | God | Good | Light | Means | Meditation | Nothing | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Will | Wills | God |
William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne
Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro’s own words that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca assures us that Didymus the grammarian wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thoughts and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write than to think! But shall I not myself, Palamedes, prove an instance that it is so, if I suspend any longer your own more important reflections by interrupting you with such as mine?
Absurd | Birth | Circumstances | Gloom | Hypothesis | Light | Observation | Opinion | Principles | World |
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
Belief | Courage | Eternal | Light | Means | Nature | Need | Trust | Wisdom | World |
What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.
Fear and Hope — those are the names of the two great passions which rule the race of man, and with which revolutionists have to deal; to give hope to the many oppressed and fear to the few oppressors, that is our business; if we do the first and give hope to the many, the few must be frightened by their hope; otherwise we do not want to frighten them; it is not revenge we want for poor people, but happiness; indeed, what revenge can be taken for all the thousands of years of the sufferings of the poor?
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Love is enough: though the world be a-waning and the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover the gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder, though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder, and this day draw a veil over all deeds passed over, yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter; the void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter these lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
By God I will not tell you more to-day, judge any way you will -- what matters it
Drowsy I lie, no folk at my command, who once was called the Lady of the Land; who might have bought a kingdom with a kiss, yea, half the world with such a sight as this.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
He was himself and he had lost the speed he started with, and he was left behind.
Those monks who went to the Tang to study before spent much time in that country and all were without mention of this, and now you write stating that in Dali 4 (769) they initiated a MahÄyÄna high seat where the bodhisattva MañjuÅ›rÄ« is placed in all temple dining halls across the land. From then until Zhenyuan 22 (806)3, exactly thirty-eight years have passed. It corresponds to Enryaku 25 (806) in the country of Great Japan. As they say, 'Looking at outward appearances unaware of their contents.'