This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Let the crux of the matter be this: strive to move forward on the spiritual path. . . it simply is not possible that a soul who has come this far would stop growing. Love is never idle." - Saint Teresa of Ávila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL
"I beg Our Lord, Monsieur, that we may be able to die to ourselves in order to rise with Him, that he may be the joy of your heart, the end and soul of your actions, and your glory in heaven. This will come to pass if, from now on, we humble ourselves as He humbled Himself, if we renounce our own satisfaction to follow Him by carrying our little crosses, and if we give our lives willingly, as He gave His, for our neighbor whom He loves so much and whom He wants us to love as ourselves." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"It will be most pleasing to Our Lord if you husband your strength in order to serve Him better." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"There is a vast difference between an Apostolic life and the solitude of the Carthusians. The latter is truly very holy but is not suited to those whom God has called to the former, which is in itself more excellent." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"Well! bon Dieu! what better opportunity awaits you to suffer something for God? I certainly see none. In the name of God, Monsieur, let us not be so little attached to God's service that we yield to a useless fear which may cause us to abandon the task He has given us." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possest with an error it is like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty. Whatsoever he lays hold on, like a drowning man, he never loses, though it do but help to sink him the sooner. His ignorance is abrupt and inaccessible, impregnable both by art and nature, and will hold out to the last, though it has nothing but rubbish to defend." - Samuel Butler
"Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"'Good morning, madam’, said Holmes, cheerily. 'My name is Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself.’" - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"If every man had a beginning, every man then was once nothing; he could not then make himself, because nothing cannot be the cause of something; “The Lord he is God; he hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. c. iii.) Whatsoever begun in time was not; and when it was nothing, it had nothing, and could do nothing; and therefore could never give to itself, nor to any other, to be—or to be able to do: for then it gave what it had not, and did what it could not. Since reason must acknowledge a first of every kind, a first man, etc., it must acknowledge him created and made, not by himself: why have not other men since risen up by themselves, not by chance? why hath not chance produced the like in that long time the world hath stood? If we never knew anything give being to itself, how can we imagine anything ever could?" - Stephen Charnock
"When the highest promises are made, God expects they should be put in suit; our Savior joins the promise and the petition together; the promise to encourage the petition, and the petition to enjoy the promise: he doth not say perhaps it shall be given, but it shall, that is, it certainly shall; your heavenly Father is unchangeably willing to give you those things. We must depend upon his immutability for the thing, and submit to his wisdom for the time. Prayer is an acknowledgment of our dependence upon God; which dependence could have no firm foundation without unchangeableness. Prayer doth not desire any change in God, but is offered to God that he would confer those things which he hath immutably willed to communicate; but he willed them not without prayer as the means of bestowing them. The light of the sun is ordered for our comfort, for the discovery of visible things, for the ripening of the fruits of the earth; but withal it is required that we use our faculty of seeing, that we employ our industry in sowing and planting, and expose our fruits to the view of the sun; that they may receive the influence of it. If a man shuts his eyes, and complains that the sun is changed into darkness, it would be ridiculous; the sun is not changed, but we alter ourselves; nor is God changed in not giving us the blessings he hath promised, because he hath promised in the way of a due address to him, and opening our souls to receive his influence, and to this, his immutability is the greatest encouragement." - Stephen Charnock
"There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice." - Stefan Zweig
"With the help of dedicated Americans from our party, every party, and no party at all, I intend to mount that stairway to preach peace for our nation and world." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
"The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
"Beautiful as is the morning of day, so is the morning of life.—Fallen though we are, there remains a purity, modesty, ingenuousness and tenderness of conscience about childhood, that looks as if the glory of Eden yet lingered over it, like the light of the day on the hill tops, at even, when the sun is down." - Thomas Guthrie
"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." - Thomas Jefferson
"The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." - Thomas Jefferson
"We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guarantors of only our own." - Thomas Jefferson
"Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men." - Thomas Merton
"Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing." - Thomas Merton
"If we are fools enough to remain at the mercy of the people who want to sell us happiness, it will be impossible for us ever to be content with anything. How would they profit if we became content? We would no longer need their new product. The last thing the salesman wants is for the buyer to become content. You are of no use in our affluent society unless you are always just about to grasp what you never have. The Greeks were not as smart as we are. In their primitive way they put Tantalus in hell. Madison Avenue, on the contrary, would convince us that Tantalus is in heaven." - Thomas Merton
"I looked for my soul but my soul I could not see. I looked for my God but my God eluded me. I looked for a friend and then I found all three." - William Blake
"What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair, eternal death." - William Blake
"A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; the language plain, and incidents well link'd; tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close." - William Cowper
"Time possesses nothing but the negative virtue of helping to wear itself out." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens." - Wendell Lewis Willkie
"Take a look at those two open hands of yours. They are tools with which to serve, make friends, and reach out for the best in life. Open hands open the way to achievement Put them to work today." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,) to cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy." - Washington Irving
"Inner peace... creates world peace!" - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup." - Wendell Berry
"To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity." - Wendell Berry
"I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor - all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked - who is good? Not that men are ignorant - what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"It interests me tremendously to make copies... I started it by chance and I find it teaches me things." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child's bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal- shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying again and again." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Passion and shame torment him, and rage is mingled with his grief." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others." - Václav Havel
"Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"The ever varying brilliancy and grandeur of the landscape, and the magnificence of the sky, sun, moon and stars, enter more extensively into the enjoyment of mankind than we, perhaps ever think, or can possibly apprehend, without frequent and extensive investigation. This beauty and splendor of the objects around us, it is ever to be remembered, is not necessary to their existence, nor to what we commonly intend by their usefulness. It is therefore to be regarded as a source of pleasure, gratuitously super-induced upon the general nature of the objects themselves, and in this light, a testimony of the divine goodness, peculiarly affecting." - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV
"But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck." - William James