This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise.
Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being.
Experience | Faith | Love | Sorrow | Wisdom |
Not to sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine.
To brood over our sorrow is to embitter our grief.
The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets.
Childhood | Children | Labor | Men | Nature | Passion | Play | Poetry | Sense | Wisdom | World |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.
The waves of human passion rise and fall; worldly things are as transitory as passing clouds.
Passion |
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
Not from anything in the world would I be free from God; I wish to be free in God and for God. It is needful that my passion for a freedom without bounds should involve a conflict with the world, but not with God.
Roland Barthes, fully Roland Gérard Barthes
What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo
After rain comes sunshine; after darkness comes the glorious dawn. There is no sorrow without its alloy of joy, there is no joy without its admixture of sorrow. Behind the ugly terrible mask of misfortune lies the beautiful soothing countenance of prosperity. So, tear the mask!
Darkness | Dawn | Joy | Misfortune | Prosperity | Sorrow | Ugly | Misfortune |
There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Eternal | Excellence | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |