This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license." - Wilhelm Reich
"One must further note that the economic order of a free society presupposes competition only in as far as that economy is a market economy dependent on the division of labor. Competition, therefore, is only one of the pillars on which such an order rests, while the other is self-sufficiency. We are, therefore, free to modify the competitive character of the economy in full harmony with the principles of our economic order, by enlarging the sphere of marketless self-sufficiency...This is a new and important point illustrating the inestimable importance of sustenance farming and the `rurification' of the industrial proletariat." - Wilhelm Röepke
"Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose; do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again / I am to see to it that I do not lose you" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"I sing the Equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things; I say Nature continues—Glory continues; I praise with electric voice; for I do not see one imperfection in the universe; and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe. O setting sun! though the time has come, I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"My own songs awakened from that hour, and with them the key, the word up from the waves, the word of the sweetest song and all songs, that strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet, (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet garments, bending aside) the sea whispered me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Peace is always beautiful, The myth of heaven indicates peace and night." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, be not afraid of my body." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Trippers and askers surround me, people I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, the latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, my dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, the real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, the sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; these come to me days and nights and go from me again, but they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, the smallest sprout shows there is really no death, and if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, and ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
"I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In non-technologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality.’" - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"All of us have the capacity to attract to ourselves what seems to be missing in our lives." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Begin with the end in mind. Start with the end outcome and work backwards to make your dream possible." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Encourage children to be risk-takers rather than always taking the safe road." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"If you want your child to respect himself, give him an example of a person who does the same, and never, ever waiver from that position." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Shift from a human doing to a human being." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"The power of intention manifests as an expression of expanding creativity, kindness, love, and beauty." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Emptiness is the pregnant void out of which all creation springs. But many of us fear emptiness. We prefer to remain...surrounded by things...we imagine are subject to our control." - Wayne Muller
"Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being. This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. (pg. 308, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)" - Wendell Berry
"The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world." - Wendell Berry
"To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain." - Wendell Berry
"Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"If the ego and the power drive are still in charge, loss is seen as a further challenge to rectify the process. Once we have tasted success and we know what it feels like to have the withdrawal and the abandonment and the rejection through failure, we may sell our souls for the success. We have to deal with the loss of power – we are not the process that is transforming – these phenomena are created by Shiva. In those periods of time when our power is swept away to a degree, we need to accommodate to the dance. In the deepest most mysterious process, one is powerless – one is a product of something else, and you can run around and create all sorts of things around you to give you a sense that that is not the truth, or at some point you are willing to let it all go and enter that extreme mystery of powerlessness. The powerlessness is what transforms the infantile power drive - which is the one that gets panicky when things start to go - into one’s natural being, not one’s ego compensations and power drives, which are primitive Transcendental forces. The key is, how do you reach your natural being? It´s probably when the thing that we revere the most, that which we have placed the most value in, is either threatened or it goes. The fundamental inadequacy mystery, the vulnerability, the powerlessness are what bring us to the Transcendent, and one can be annihilated by the Transcendent, and/or one awakens and comes to a new realization through it." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"The surface mind is like a dinghy on a vast sea. Dreams are the dimension for initiation and awakenings. Revelations, healing, or the reflection of a potential healing show up in dreams. One puts oneself into a vulnerable position because one surrenders the surface mind’s preferential viewpoint and goes into letting the dream reveal what its forces might be, and what the intent of the vaster nature is. Denied aspects by the surface psyche are cast into the unconscious where they live their material and influence not only us but others as well, whether we are conscious of it or not. The ego can’t project, it can’t cast out, it is predominantly a witness. What you think are your resources, and who and what you think you are is really a mask, and it precludes your seeing the authentic being. The whole development in the second half of life is to discover the authentic being and to release the defenses, and the masks, and meeting other people’s expectations. We begin to explore the mystery of natural beingness which is a very strange things for human beings – we have to be trained back into it." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"The essential defect of the ideal utilitarian theory is that it ignores the highly personal; character of duty." - W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
"If the stars that move together as one, disband, flying like insects of fire in a cavern of night, pipperoo, pippera, pipperum . . . The rest is rot." - Wallace Stevens
"No thread of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown its venom of renown, and on your head no crown is simpler than the simple hair." - Wallace Stevens
"Rou-cou spoke the dove, like the sooth lord of sorrow, of sooth love and sorrow, and a hail-bow, hail-bow, to this morrow." - Wallace Stevens
"The body is no body to be seen but is an eye that studies its black lid." - Wallace Stevens
"The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold, the catbird's gobble in the morning half-awake these are real only if I make them so. Whistle for me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green, intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin and I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real." - Wallace Stevens
"The idols have seen lots of poverty, snakes and gold and lice, but not the truth." - Wallace Stevens
"The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it." - Wallace Stevens
"The wind shifts like this: like a human without illusions, who still feels irrational things within her." - Wallace Stevens
"Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, when I have no engagements written on my block, when no one comes to disturb my inward peace, when no one comes to take me away from myself and turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, a broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, being so contrived that it takes too long a time to get myself back to myself when they have gone." - Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
"Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"For there is no kind of material, no body, and no thing that can be produced or conceived of, which is not made up of elementary particles; and nature does not admit of a truthful exploration in accordance with the doctrines of the physicists without an accurate demonstration of the primary causes of things, showing how and why they are as they are." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"If our designs for private houses are to be correct, we must at the outset take note of the countries and climates in which they are built." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"Music, also, the architect ought to understand so that he may have knowledge of the canonical and mathematical theory, and besides be able to tune ballistae, catapultae, and scorpiones to the proper key. For to the right and left in the beams are the holes in the frames through which the strings of twisted sinew are stretched by means of windlasses and bars, and these strings must not be clamped and made fast until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman. For the arms thrust through those stretched strings must, on being let go, strike their blow together at the same." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"Then, too, the columns at the corners should be made thicker than the others by a fiftieth of their own diameter, because they are sharply outlined by the unobstructed air around them, and seem to the beholder more slender than they are." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"Therefore it was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men, to the deliberate assembly, and to social intercourse." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Dhyan is not an activity but a state of being, a dimension of being. It is a state of motionlessness where the ego is dissolved and you have let it be dissolved, where there is no experiencing but only a state of non-knowing, non-doing. Some have described it as the dark night of the soul. There is no tension at all in this state; the space within is being activated. It is a very delicate state that has to be looked after. You need to be alone then and need time to adjust to it." - Vimala Thakar
"Generally we waste energy in unessential secondary things. This criminal waste leaves us tired and troubled at the end of the day. An overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and you begin the next day with a sluggish body and a lethargic mind." - Vimala Thakar
"Growing into Silence - The voluntary cessation, non-action of movement, can become possible if the brain, the cerebral organ, is not a restless, disorderly, chaotic brain." - Vimala Thakar