This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking.
Heaven | Indifference | Mind | Music | Past | Sadness | Sound | Time | Wisdom | Worth | Old |
Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.
Waste not your strength trying to push shut doors which God is opening. Neither wear yourself out in keeping open doors which ought to be forever sealed. Some episode in your life, over which you are anxious, is closed. it is in the past. Whatever its memory, you cannot change it. But you can shut the door. Go into some silent place of thought. Test your self-respect. Ask your soul, "Have I emerged from this experience with honor, or if not, can honor be retrieved?" And if your soul answers, "Yes," close then the door to that Past; hang a garland over the portal if you will, but come away without tarrying. The east is aflame with the radiance of the morning, and before you stands many another door, held open by the hand of God.
Change | Experience | God | Honor | Life | Life | Memory | Past | Respect | Self | Soul | Strength | Thought | Waste | Will | Wisdom | God |
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
Music | Nothing | Wisdom | Understand |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Felix Mendelssohn, fully Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
It's not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
In all things except those that are simply bad, change is to be feared: change of seasons, winds, food, and humors. And no laws are held in their true honor except those to which God has given some ancient duration, so that no one knows their origin or that they were ever different.
Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor, so fear is necessary in a despotic government: with regard to virtue, there is no occasion for it, and honor would be extremely dangerous.
Fear | Government | Honor | Regard | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
We do not honor the fathers by going back to the place where they stopped but by going on toward the things their vision foresaw.