This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
Belief | Excitement | Good | Need | Nothing | Right | Sense | Wrong | Understand |
When religion is in the hands of the mere natural man, he is always the worse for it; it adds a bad heat to his own dark fire and helps to inflame his four elements of selfishness, envy, pride, and wrath. And hence it is that worse passions, or a worse degree of them are to be found in persons of great religious zeal than in others that made no pretenses to it. History also furnishes us with instances of persons of great piety and devotion who have fallen into great delusions and deceived both themselves and others. The occasion of their fall was this: ... They considered their whole nature as the subject of religion and divine graces; and therefore their religion was according to the workings of their whole nature, and the old man was as busy and as much delighted in it as the new.
Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: When a man has had so much benefit from the gospel, as to know his own misery, his want of a redeemer, who he is, and how is he to be found; there everything seems to be done, both to awaken and direct his prayer, and make it a true praying in and by the Spirit. For when the heart really pants and longs after God, its prayer is a praying, as moved and animated by the Spirit of God; it is the breath or inspiration of God, stirring, moving and opening itself in the heart. For though the early nature, our old man, can oblige or accustom himself to take heavenly words at certain times into his mouth, yet this is a certain truth, that nothing ever did, or can have the least desire or tendency to ascend to heaven, but that which came down from heaven; and therefore nothing in the heart can pray, aspire, and long after God, but the Spirit of God moving and stirring in it.
The spirit of prayer is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life, it is a stretching with all its desire after the life of God, it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, to receive a spirit from above, to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God.
Calamity | Distress | God | Good | Heart | Love | Man | Peace | Repentance | Right | Sin | Will | Calamity | God |
The first law of success... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor the left.
The fullest instruction, and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained, in free and easy chat with others.
A queen I was, what Gods I knew I loved, and nothing evil was there in my thought, and yet by love my wretched heart was moved until to utter ruin I was brought! Alas! thou sayest our gods were vain and nought, wait, wait, till thou hast heard this tale of mine, then shalt thou think them devilish or divine.
Right |
The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of is the reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
Civilization | Day | Evil | Existence | Individual | Life | Life | Melancholy | Right |
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.
Absolute | Ambition | Blush | Education | Feelings | Honor | Individual | Men | Pride | Question | Race | Reason | Right | Shame | System | Time | Worth | Ambition | Old |
It seems to me that the sense of beauty in the external world, of interest in the life of man as a drama, and the desire of communicating this sense of beauty and interest to our fellows is or ought to be an essential part of the humanity of man, and that any man or set of men lacking that sense are less than men, and lack a portion of their birthright just as they were blind or deaf.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The point is, you see, said Ford, that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.
Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?
Computer | Nothing | People | Right | Silence | Work | Think |
It’s going to be a long while before people forget that Hurricane Katrina pretty much destroyed New Orleans. After which, the citizens of that fine city promptly rebuilt it in the same place, ten feet below sea level right next to the Mississippi. What could possibly go wrong? Again, I mean.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There is no tropical island paradise I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.
Most people I’ve talked to are convinced that they’re not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I’m not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.