This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco
A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability.
Abuse | Balance | Death | Desire | Government | Impulse | Individual | Justice | Little | Man | Order | People | Power | Struggle | System | Weakness | Will | Government |
In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; From the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.
It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world—and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish—she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.
Desire | Men | Reality | Respect | Thought | Respect | Thought |
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.
Death | Desire | Immortality |
We can know only one thing about God — that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
Desire |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL
I believe in order that I may understand.
Desire | Heart | Love | Order | Reform | Understanding | Think | Understand |
Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
God by nature is uncompounded, joined to nothing, composed of nothing, to whom nothing happens by accident; but only possessing in His own nature that which is divine, enclosing all things, Himself closed out of nothing, penetrating all things, Himself never penetrable, everywhere complete, everywhere present at the same time, whether in heaven or on earth or in the depths of the sea, incapable of being seen or measured by our senses, to be followed only by faith and venerated in our religion.
Desire | Foresight | Grace | Hope | Love | Strength | Teach | Think |
Anselm of Canterbury, aka Saint Anselm or Archbishop of Canterbury NULL
I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created your image in me, so that I may remember you, think of you, love you. But this image is so obliterated and worn away by wickedness, it is so obscured by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do, unless you renew and reform it. I am not attempting, O Lord, to penetrate your loftiness, for I cannot begin to match my understanding with it, but I desire in some measure to understand your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this too I believe, that "unless I believe, I shall not understand."
Desire | Heart | Love | Order | Reform | Understanding | Think | Understand |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
Men and woman, young and old, rich and poor, the sanguine and despondent, the sick and whole, rulers and ruled, the wise and ignorant, the cowardly and courageous, the wrathful and meek, the successful and failing, do not require the same instruction and encouragement.
Absurd | Care | Day | Desire | Despise | Effort | Freedom | Good | Mercy | Money | Thought | Time | Thought |
Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL
I do not well see what more I shall have in Heaven than now, she once said. I shall see the good God, it is true; but as to being with Him, I am wholly with Him already upon earth.
Consolation | Desire | Enough | Love |