This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him." - Thomas Browne, fully Sir Thomas Browne
"Men of England! who inherit rights that cost your sires their blood." - Thomas Campbell
"A true delineation of the smallest man is capable of interesting the greatest man." - Thomas Carlyle
"A star looks down at me, / And says: `Here I and you / Stand, each in our degree: / What do you mean to do?'" - Thomas Hardy
"Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill-usage." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness" - Thomas Merton
"If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love." - Thomas Merton
"One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife." - Thomas Merton
"Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny… This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. We can evade this responsibility by playing with masks, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and creative way of living. It is quite easy, it seems, to please everyone. But in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high. To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls working out our salvation, is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention to reality at every moment and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation." - Thomas Merton
"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture." - Thomas Merton
"Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." - William Blake
"The Schoolboy - I love to rise in a summer morn When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the skylark sings with me. O! what sweet company. But to go to school in a summer morn, O! it drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day In sighing and dismay. Ah! then at times I drooping sit, And spend many an anxious hour, Nor in my book can I take delight, Nor sit in learning’s bower, Worn thro’ with the dreary shower. How can the bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring? O! father and mother, if buds are nipp’d And blossoms blown away, And if the tender plants are stripp’d Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and care’s dismay, How shall the summer arise in joy, Or the summer fruits appear? Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy, Or bless the mellowing year, When the blasts of winter appear?" - William Blake
"Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce, And dost not know the garment from the man; Every harlot was a virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Tho’ thou art worship’d by the names divine Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Night’s decline, The lost traveller’s dream under the hill." - William Blake
"Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also." - William Blake
"Never seek to tell thy love love that never told can be; for the gentle wind does move silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; trembling, cold, in ghastly fears ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me a traveler came by silently, invisibly- he took her with a sigh." - William Blake
"O God, protect me from my friends, that they have not power over me. Thou hast giv'n me power to protect myself from thy bitterest enemies." - William Blake
"The moon like a flower in heaven's high bower, with silent delight, sits and smiles on the night." - William Blake
"I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"The reason progress is slow is that we always expect other men to be the heroes and to live the heroic lives. But we all have hero stuff in us. In our sphere of life we can always live more heroically and triumphantly and grow in heroic stature." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done." - Walter Brueggemann
"When it is faithful to Jesus, the church will see the hegemonic economic political-military-ideological force of the U.S. empire as destructive and eventually lethal." - Walter Brueggemann
"The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force." - Walter Lippmann
"Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else." - Washington Irving
"The you that is beyond form is eternal and alive in a formless world." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"After World War II, we hoped the world might be united for the sake of peacemaking. Now the world is being “globalized” for the sake of trade and the so-called free market—for the sake, that is, of plundering the world for cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap materials. How nations, let alone regions and communities, are to shape and protect themselves within this “global economy” is far from clear." - Wendell Berry
"Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea." - Wallace Stevens
"Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In the dimension of dhyan (meditation) you have let the activities of the mind come to an end" - Vimala Thakar
"We become aware of all that is happening within us, of the different emotions arising within us, for example if we begin to get angry we are aware of it and so the grip of anger loosens its hold over us." - Vimala Thakar
"One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily... Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been too happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter 'I.' One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter 'I." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"So, in a summer day waves collect, rises, the watershed, and fall, gather and fall, and the whole universe seems to say, you always say, that's all ever more pressing, and the heart the body which is lying in the sun on the shore she says. That's all. Do not fear, says heart. Do not fear, says the heart, entrusting her big sigh burden any obstacles for all sorrows, and resume, begin, gather, let them fall." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"We are about to part, said Neville. Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Do not resist or complain or fight. Let truth win. If we no longer value our resistance, something new will break through." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"First I am one with my sickness. Then I stand apart and see my sickness. Then I am one with my wholeness." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?" - Victor Hugo
"He had been married and had had offspring. He did not know what had become of his wife and children. He had lost them the way he might have lost his handkerchief." - Victor Hugo
"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul." - Victor Hugo
"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress." - Victor Hugo