This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"On Epiphany day, we are still the people walking. We are still people in the dark, and the darkness looms large around us, beset as we are by fear, anxiety, brutality, violence, loss, a dozen alienations that we cannot manage. We are-we could be-people of your light. So we pray for the light of your glorious presence as we wait for your appearing; we pray for the light of your wondrous grace as we exhaust our coping capacity; we pray for your gift of newness that will override our weariness; we pray that we may see and know and hear and trust in your good rule. That we may have energy, courage,..." - Walter Brueggemann
"The contemporary abrasion between imperial ideology and poetic alternative is a contentious one, with the poetic alternative being fragile and mostly unauthorized and unrecognized." - Walter Brueggemann
"The prophet is engaged in a battle for language in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge." - Walter Brueggemann
"Those who are living in anxiety and fear, most especially fear of scarcity, have no time or energy for the common good. Anxiety is no adequate basis for the common good; anxiety will cause the formulation of policy and of exploitative practices that are inimical to the common good, a systemic greediness that precludes the common good." - Walter Brueggemann
"A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities." - Walter Gropius, fully Walter Adolph Georg Gropius
"Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration." - Walter Lippmann
"In Clementina’s artless mien Lucilla asks me what I see, and are the roses of sixteen enough for me? Lucilla asks, if that be all, have I not cull’d as sweet before: ah yes, Lucilla! and their fall I still deplore. I now behold another scene, where Pleasure beams with Heaven’s own light, more pure, more constant, are serene, and not less bright. Faith, on whose breast the Loves repose, whose chain of flowers no force can sever, and Modesty who, when she goes, is gone forever." - Walter Savage Landor
"When any duty is to be done, it is fortunate for you if you feel like doing it; but, if you do not feel like it, that is no reason for not doing it." - Washington Gladden
"The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind." - Washington Irving
"Whilst kicking and biting, love develops." - Welsh Proverbs
"In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world." - Wendell Berry
"In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known." - Wendell Berry
"My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves." - Wendell Berry
"Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss." - Wendell Berry
"Strength is power in action. Beauty is the assemblage of all graces. The strength and the beauty, being connected with God's sanctuary, must be divine strength and divine beauty. In what, then, consist this strength and beauty which so emphasize and make distinctive His sanctuary?" - W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
"I was almost put out of business by a well-meaning corpse." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"If I had to live my life over, I’d live over a saloon." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.... The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and clasical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"Day after day, throughout the winter, we hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason in a world of wind and frost." - Wallace Stevens
"The A B C of being, the ruddy temper, the hammer of red and blue, the hard sound steel against intimation the sharp flash, the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X." - Wallace Stevens
"The blue sun in his red cockade walked the United States today, taller than any eye could see, older than any man could be. He caught the flags and the picket-lines of people, round the auto-works." - 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
"We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Superstition: Any practice or form of religion to which we are not accustomed. Any worship that is not offered up to the true God is false and superstitious. The only true God is the God of our ; the only true worship is that which seems the most fitting to them; and to which they have accustomed us from our earliest childhood; any other worship is clearly superstitious, false, and even ridiculous." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream,-- All is here begun, and finished elsewhere." - Victor Hugo
"Every intellectual effort, be it drama, poem, or romance, must contain three ingredients — what the author has felt, what he has observed, and what he has divined." - Victor Hugo
"In the twilight, it was a vision of power." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons, or more sermons into the fire." - Vance Havner
"The church is a hospital for sinners and not a museum for saints." - Vance Havner
"The devil will let a preacher prepare a sermon if it will keep him from preparing himself." - Vance Havner
"Too many church services start at eleven sharp and end at twelve dull." - Vance Havner
"Too many churches start at eleven o'clock sharp, and end at twelve o'clock dull. You will never see revival in a comfortable church." - Vance Havner
"For joys and sorrows are their dear delight; even as a lover takes the weal and woe felt for his lady. Such is wisdom's might." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"I do not know why the dead do not come back to life. Perhaps death is so wonderful, in ways we cannot comprehend, that they prefer it over and above their friends and loved ones, although I am inclined to doubt that be the case." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic." - William James
"The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one." - William James
"The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation." - William James
"We have overdeveloped the individualism that arose in a pioneer country. We are destined to become more co-operative, more collectivistic, and to find in this direction still greater opportunity for the individual, not so much restricted and defeated by competition but enlarged and enhanced by the support of a common will. It may be that the problem of material goods--of the necessary but yet external goods of food, clothing, shelter, and money-is about to be solved through new discoveries and developments, with the energies of men left freer than they have ever been to cultivate on higher levels the sharable goods of life, such as love and wisdom. These values grow with use and multiply by being freely shared." - Edward Scribner Ames
"ROMEO: I dreamt a dream tonight. MERCUTIO: And so did I. ROMEO: Well, what was yours? MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie. ROMEO: In bed asleep, while they do dream things true. MERCUTIO: O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomi over men's noses as they lie asleep." -
"But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There's a joke about a very funny Italian poor man who goes to church every day to pray before the statue of a great saint, begging, Dear saint, please, please, please ... Give me the grace of winning the lottery. This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks at him and says with a wearily: My son, please, please, please ... buy a ticket. '" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There's a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great 21st century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn't compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed. I am inspired by the regal self-assurance of this city, so grounded and rounded, so amused and monumental, knowing she is held securely in the palm of history. I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Life, struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–' 'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, and none was left to love in all the world." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning