This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
No ship takes us to distant lands better than a book.
Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy - love which creates life?
Sorrow |
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.
Body | Earth | Fear | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow | Soul | Struggle |
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
Desire | Individual | Integrity | Nothing | People | Plenty | War | Wisdom |
The first thing that we have to realize is a fact of fundamental importance, because it means breaking away from all the ordinary prepossessions of orthodoxy. The plain fact is that Jesus taught no theology whatever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical. Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely concerned itself with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people to learn that all the doctrines and theologies of the churches are human inventions built up by their authors out of their own mentalities… There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible; it simply is not there.
Ability | Birth | Care | Consciousness | Debt | Determination | Discovery | Life | Life | Power | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Child |
Never recognize evil as having any reality. Never grant it the courtesy of the slightest or most formal acquiescence. Even though you may not be able to demonstrate over error for the time being, still you must not recognize it as having any power or reality. Every time you speak or think of evil as having any power-you give it that much power. Every time you allow it to scare you - you give it that much authority. Always fight error in thought - not in the sense of struggling with it, but fight it in the sense of knowing that it is only false belief. Do not let it rest quietly in thought; but harass it. An old soldier who was with Grant during most of the Civil War, once said; "The difference between Grant and McClellan was this-McClellan was a mighty fine soldier, knew all the military textbooks by heart and what you ought to do-but he wouldn't fight. When Lincoln would ask him to fight, he would say, 'Not ready yet' or 'We must be thoroughly prepared for a thing like that; next year maybe.' But Grant, he was always fighting. No matter how few men Grant had with him, if the enemy was anywhere near, Grant took a sock at him. Grant would always fight." The only attitude for the metaphysical student is; "I believe in Divine Harmony and nothing else. I do not believe there is any power in evil, and it is not going to get any recognition from me. The Truth about my problem is true now, not next week or next year but now, and the Truth concerning anything is all that there is of it." This is the scientific way of fighting and harassing error-to see that it has no chance to dig itself in. This is the General Grant touch. Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.
The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.
The Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world -whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself -is amenable to man's thought, and that he had dominion over it when he knows it.
Better | Bible | Faith | God | Mind | Success | Will | Wisdom | God | Bible | Think |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth.
Existence | Freedom | Pain | Phenomena | Solitude | Sorrow | Work |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.
Beginning | Existence | Experience | Freedom | Knowledge | Light | Object | Pain | Phenomena | Reason | Sense | Solitude | Sorrow | Space | Suppression | Truth | Work |
Patience is the ballast of the soul, that will keep it from rolling and tumbling in the greatest storms: and he, that will venture out without this to make him sail even and steady will certainly make shipwreck, and drown himself; first, in the cares and sorrows of this world; and, then, in perdition.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
Behavior | Day | Determination | Enough | Good | Kill | Man | Nothing | Sorrow | Understand |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
Better | Day | Nothing | Progress | Sorrow | Will | Writing |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
No. Have it here where it is quiet. You and your quiet, said Brett. What is it men feel about quiet? We like it, said the count. Like you like your noise, my dear.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.
Little | Science | Technology | Truth | Wisdom |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.