This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
Better | Ends | God | Love | Men | Passion | Quiet | Soul | God | Old |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
It is the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that very well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
Age | Day | Grief | Happy | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Mystery | Serenity | Soul | Old |
Nicholas Black Elk, formally Heȟáka Sápa
Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.
Childhood | Earth | Life | Life | Man | Power | Religion | World |
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
To be sure, the Bible contains the direct words of God. How do we know? The Moral Majority says so. How do they know? They say they know and to doubt it makes you an agent of the Devil or, worse, a Lbr-l Dm-cr-t. And what does the Bible textbook say? Well, among other things it says the earth was created in 4004 BC (Not actually, but a Moral Majority type figured that out three and a half centuries ago, and his word is also accepted as inspired.) The sun was created three days later. The first male was molded out of dirt, and the first female was molded, some time later, out of his rib. As far as the end of the universe is concerned, the Book of Revelation (6:13-14) says: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." … Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Bible | Devil | Doubt | Earth | Force | Heaven | Majority | People | Revelation | Thinking | Time | Universe | Words | Bible |
This pure mind, which is the source of all things, shines forever with the radiance of its own perfection. But most people are not aware of it, and think that mind is just the faculty that sees, hears, feels, and knows. Blinded by their own sight, hearing, feeling, and knowing, they don't perceive the radiance of the source. If they could eliminate all conceptual thinking, this source would appear, like the sun rising through the empty sky and illuminating the whole universe. Therefore, you students of the Tao who seek to understand through seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing, when your perceptions are cut off, your way to mind will be cut off and you will find nowhere to enter. Just realize that although mind is manifested in these perceptions, it is neither part of them nor separate from them. You shouldn't try to analyze these perceptions, or think about them at all; but you shouldn't seek the one mind apart from them. Don't hold on to them or leave them behind or dwell in them or reject them. Above, below, and all around you, all things spontaneously exist, because there is nowhere outside the Buddha mind.
Mind | People | Will | Think | Understand |
A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.
Beauty | Body | Day | Eternity | Fidelity | God | Greatness | Love | Man | Wonder | Beauty | God |
Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky, Before the sun came out. You cannot touch the clouds, you know but you feel the rain and know How glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either, But you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything.
Such is friendship, that through it we love places and seasons; for as bright bodies emit rays to a distance, and flowers drop their sweet leaves on the ground around them, so friends impart favor even to the places where they dwell. With friends even poverty is pleasant. Words cannot express the joy which a friend imparts; they only can know who have experienced. A friend is dearer than the light of heaven, for it would be better for us that the sun were exhausted than that we should be without friends.
Better | Friend | Joy | Light | Love | Poverty | Words | Friends |
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
More joyful eyes look at the setting, than at the rising sun. Burdens are laid down by the poor, whom the sun consoles more than the rich. I yearn toward him when he sets, not when he rises.
Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
Tears of joy are the dew in which the sun of righteousness is mirrored.
Joy | Righteousness |
John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
The soul that is clouded by the desires is darkened in the understanding and allows neither the sun of natural reason nor that of the supernatural Wisdom of God to shine upon it and illumine it clearly... At the same time, when the soul is darkened in the understanding, it is benumbed also in the will, and the memory becomes dull and disordered in its dire operation. The intellect cannot get the illumination of God’s wisdom, the will cannot get the love of God, and the memory cannot get God’s image... Darkness and coarseness will always be with a soul until its appetites are extinguished. The appetites are like a cataract on the eye or specks of dust in it; until removed they obstruct vision... The affections and appetites deprive them of a treasure of divine light... Any appetite, even one that is but slightly imperfect, stains and defiles the soul.
Darkness | God | Love | Memory | Reason | Soul | Understanding | Will | Wisdom | God | Intellect |
Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.
God is a shower to the heart burned up with grief; God is a sun to the face deluged with tears.
Krishna, also Kreeshna, Krsna, Lord Krishna NULL
Even as the radiance of the sun enlightens all regions, above, below, and slantwise, so that only God, glorious and worthy of worship, rules over all His creation.
Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL
Once upon a time this (universe) was made of darkness, without anything that could be discerned, without any distinguishing marks, impossible to know through reasoning and understanding; it seemed to be entirely asleep. Then the Lord who is Self-existent, himself unmanifest, caused this (universe) to become manifest; putting his energy into the great elements and everything else, he became visible and dispelled the darkness. The one who can be grasped only by what is beyond the sensory powers, who is subtle, unmanifest, eternal, unimaginable, he of whom all creatures are made — he is the only who actually appeared. He thought deeply, for he wished to emit various sorts of creatures from his own body; first he emitted the waters, and then he emitted his semen in them. That (semen) became a golden egg, as bright as the sun with his thousand rays; Brahma himself, the grandfather of all people, was born in that (egg). ‘The waters are born of man,' so it is said; indeed, the waters are the children of the (primordial) man. And since they were his resting place in ancient time, therefore he is traditionally known as Narayana (‘resting on those born of man'). The one who is the first cause, unmanifest, eternal, the essence of what is real and unreal, emitted the Man, who is known in the world as Brahma. The Lord dwelt in that egg for a whole year, and then just by thinking he himself divided the egg into two. Out of the two fragments he made the sky and the earth, and the atmosphere in the middle, and the eight cardinal directions, and the eternal place of the waters. And out of himself he grew the mind-and-heart, the essence of what is real and unreal, and from the mind-and-heart came the sense of ‘I', the controlling consciousness of self,, and the great one which is the self, and all (material things that have) the three qualities, and, one by one, the five sensory powers that grasp the sensory objects.
Children | Consciousness | Energy | Eternal | Lord | Sense | Thinking | Thought | Time | World | Thought |
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us.
Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.