This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Discretion is the better part of valour. [The better part of valour is discretion.] Henry IV, Part I, Act v, Scene 4
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
Day | Death | Insight | Little | Man | Method | Mind | Patience | Psychology | Style | Success | Superiority | Tenacity | Thought | Uncertainty | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Thought |
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
It is not only our duty to pray for others, but also to desire the prayers of others for ourselves.
Heaven |
However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.
Abstract | Individuality | Majority | Space |
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
Day | Happy | Imagination | Man | People |
There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.
He that is endeavoring to subdue, and root out of his mind, all those passions of pride, envy and ambition, which religion opposes, is doing more to make himself happy, even in this life than he that is contriving means to indulge them.
The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.
Darkness |
Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant Life we have loved, through green leaf and through sere, Though still the less we knew of its intent.
Day |
Forget days past, heart-broken, put all memory by No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree.
Love is Enough Love is enough though the world be a-waning, And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining, Though the skies 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.
O Cromwell, Cromwell, Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies. The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Wolsey at IV, i)
Will |
O Hamlet, speak no more. Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grained spots As will not leave their tinct. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Gertrude, Queen of Denmark at III, iv)
O Lord, that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.