This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us." - Thomas Merton
"There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning? There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill." - Thomas Merton
"A Child Of God Longing To See Him Beloved - There's not an echo round me, But I am glad should learn, How pure a fire has found me, The love with which I burn. For none attends with pleasure To what I would reveal; They slight me out of measure, And laugh at all I feel. The rocks receive less proudly The story of my flame; When I approach, they loudly Reverberate his name. I speak to them of sadness, And comforts at a stand; They bid me look for gladness, And better days at hand. Far from all habitation, I heard a happy sound; Big with the consolation, That I have often found. I said, 'My lot is sorrow, My grief has no alloy; The rocks replied--'Tomorrow, Tomorrow brings thee joy.' These sweet and sacred tidings, What bliss it is to hear! For, spite of all my chidings, My weakness and my fear, No sooner I receive them, Than I forget my pain, And, happy to believe them, I love as much again. I fly to scenes romantic, Where never men resort; For in an age so frantic Impiety is sport. For riot and confusion They barter things above; Condemning, as delusion, The joy of perfect love. In this sequestered corner, None hears what I express; Delivered from the scorner, What peace do I possess! Beneath the boughs reclining, Or roving o'er the wild, I live as undesigning And harmless as a child. No troubles here surprise me, I innocently play, While Providence supplies me, And guards me all the day: My dear and kind defender Preserves me safely here, From men of pomp and splendour, Who fill a child with fear" - William Cowper
"Regions Caesar never knew thy posterity shall sway; where his eagles never flew, none invincible as they. Such the bard's prophetic words, pregnant with celestial fire, bending as he swept the chords of his sweet but awful lyre." - William Cowper
"Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by circa 1920." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"What statesmanship! What vision! What power! We have known nothing like it since my ancestor, Peter the Great, broke a window into Europe by overrunning the Baltic states in the 18th Century. Stalin has made Russia great again!" - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943)" - Wilhelm Reich
"No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. This is valid, no matter whether we speak in terms such as “God,” “Natural Law,” “Cosmic Primordial Force,” “Ether” or “Cosmic Orgone Energy.”" - Wilhelm Reich
"I don't make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Liberalism regards man as improvable but not perfectible." - Walter Lippmann
"You must not complicate your government beyond the capacity of its electorate to understand it." - Walter Lippmann
"Do you want to tear your life apart and get rid of everything you've known as a lifestyle? Like seeing your family? Being with your friends? A fishing trip? A hunting trip? A night's sleep?" - Walter Mondale, fully Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale
"He wasn't much of a listener, not a great payer of attention to things outside his head." - Wendell Berry
"What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest." - Wendell Berry
"When men have appreciated the countless differences which the exercise of that judgment must necessarily produce, when they have estimated the intrinsic fallibility of their reason, and the degree in which it is distorted by the will, when, above all, they have acquired that love of truth which a constant appeal to private judgment at last produces, they will never dream that guilt can be associated with an honest conclusion, or that one class of arguments should be stifled by authority." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watching them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what's that? A terrifying volley of pistol-shots rings out—cracks sharply; ripples spread— silence laps smooth over sound. A tree—a tree has fallen, a sort of death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds melancholy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising." - Václav Havel
"Again and again mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me, and, taking my hand, have not only shed tears upon it, but they have added, `God bless you, Mr. President! Why should they pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas. I consented to their sons' being put in the most difficult part of the battle line, where death was certain...Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me? Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe, and rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; for the apparel oft proclaims the man. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Polonius at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare
"By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune (Now, my dear lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop." - William Shakespeare
"Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker." - William James
"A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. - They create an ideal character the perfections of which compensate in some degree for imperfections of their own." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"This is the final test of the truth or untruth of a constructive or disintegrating philosophy of life. What increases man's sense of power, and therefore, for him, the content of life, is true. What tends to the diminishing of the store of moral resiliency and of the energy needed for resisting as well as for onward pushing is corrupting, and therefore marked by falsehood's taint." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"The inspiration often seems like a tarantula bite him, shake him from sleep atavistic and in those moments it is impossible to write better than him, with far more cunning, with the most perfect taste." - Eugenio Montale
"He was talking very excitedly to me, said the Vicar, about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh