This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our Rock, our Redeemer, our King, Creator of holy beings. You shall be praised forever. You fashion angelic spirits to serve You; beyond the heavens, they all await Your command. In chorus they proclaim with reverence words of the living God, eternal King. Adoring beloved, and choice are they all, in awe fulfilling their Creator’s will. In purity and sanctity they raise their voices in song and psalm, extolling and exalting, declaring the power, praise, holiness, and majesty of God, the great mighty, awesome King, the Holy One. One to another they vow loyalty to God’s kingship, one to another they join to hallow their Creator with serenity, pure speech, and sacred song, in unison chanting reverence: Holy, holy, holy, Adonai tzeva’ot; the whole world is filled with His glory. As in the prophet’s vision, soaring celestial creatures roar, responding with a chorus of adoration: Praised be the glory of the Lord throughout the universe. To praiseworthy God they sweetly sing; the living, enduring God they celebrate in song. For He is unique, doing mighty deeds, creating new life, championing justice, sowing righteousness, reaping victory, bringing healing. Awesome in praise, Sovereign of wonders, day after day in His goodness He renews Creation. So sang the Psalmist: “Praise the Creator of great lights, for his love endures forever.” Cause a new light to illumine Zion, may we all soon share a portion of its radiance. Praised are You, Lord, Creator of lights.
Day | Earth | God | Good | Light | Lord | Love | Order | Praise | Sacred | Understanding | Wisdom | World | God |
Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.
The babbling sounds that mimic echo plays, The fairy shade, and its eternal maze? Nature and Art in all their charms combin'd, And all Elysium to one view confin'd!
Age | Beauty | Books | Children | Cost | Credit | Day | Disdain | Example | Glory | Grace | Heaven | Hope | Kill | Little | Love | Marriage | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Thought | Time | Truth | Wants | Waste | Wisdom | Beauty | Old | Thought |
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life.
W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson
The true gain is always in the struggle, not the prize. What we become must always rank as a far higher question than what we get.
Contention | Discipline | Doctrine | Genius | Indolence | Man | Wisdom | Poem |
We were really ripping off the customers,but we couldn't help it. I thought it was unconscionable that people were accumulating such quantities of silver in complete disregard of other people's welfare,I mean, photographic film was so expensive that a doctor called me to say he had to charge patients so much for X-rays he simply wasn't taking all that he should.
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
We are living at a time when it is absolutely essential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with religion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of religion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arrogant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words.
Challenge | Confidence | History | Literature | Magic | Man | Men | Power | Practice | Relationship | Religion | Research | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World |
My Spectre around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way; My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin. ‘A fathomless and boundless deep, There we wander, there we weep; On the hungry craving wind My Spectre follows thee behind. ‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow, Wheresoever thou dost go, Thro’ the wintry hail and rain. When wilt thou return again? ‘Dost thou not in pride and scorn Fill with tempests all my morn, And with jealousies and fears Fill my pleasant nights with tears? ‘Seven of my sweet loves thy knife Has bereavèd of their life. Their marble tombs I built with tears, And with cold and shuddering fears. ‘Seven more loves weep night and day Round the tombs where my loves lay, And seven more loves attend each night Around my couch with torches bright. ‘And seven more loves in my bed Crown with wine my mournful head, Pitying and forgiving all Thy transgressions great and small. ‘When wilt thou return and view My loves, and them to life renew? When wilt thou return and live? When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’ [‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: Hast thou no sins of thy own? O’er my sins thou sit and weep, And lull thy own sins fast asleep.] [‘What transgressions I commit Are for thy transgressions fit. They thy harlots, thou their slave; And my bed becomes their grave.] ‘Never, never, I return: Still for victory I burn. Living, thee alone I’ll have; And when dead I’ll be thy grave. ‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell Thou shalt never, never quell: I will fly and thou pursue: Night and morn the flight renew.’ [‘Poor, pale, pitiable form That I follow in a storm; Iron tears and groans of lead Bind around my aching head.] ‘Till I turn from Female love And root up the Infernal Grove, I shall never worthy be To step into Eternity. ‘And, to end thy cruel mocks, Annihilate thee on the rocks, And another form create To be subservient to my fate. ‘Let us agree to give up love, And root up the Infernal Grove; Then shall we return and see The worlds of happy Eternity. ‘And throughout all Eternity I forgive you, you forgive me. As our dear Redeemer said: “This the Wine, and this the Bread.”’
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.
Return, O Power of the Pentecost, return to Thy people! Shed down Thy flame on many heads! To us, as to our fathers and to those of the old time before them, give fullness of grace! Without Thee we can do nothing; but filled with the Holy Ghost, the excellency of the power will be of Thee, O God! and not of us.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
I looked for my soul but my soul I could not see. I looked for my God but my God eluded me. I looked for a friend and then I found all three.
Artifice | Children | Death | Earth | Experience | God | Light | Love | Man | Men | Patience | Price | Prosperity | Prudence | Prudence | Wife | Wisdom | God |
Does the sower sow by night, or the ploughman in darkness plough?
All flesh is grass. And all its glory fades like the fair flower dishevell'd in the wind; riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream; the man we celebrate must find a tomb, and we that worship him, ignoble graves.
Thieves at home must hang; but he that puts into his over-gorged and bloated purse the wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.