This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The roots of such fears which choke love like weeds need repeated examination. Partly they spring from failures in loving within the family and within society; partly, also, from horror of the body and its desires which the Church has done much to encourage. The exaggerated emphasis on the sinfulness of sexual intercourse has led many sensitive people to a terror of any situation where they might lose control. This in turn leads in some cases to a fear of the opposite sex, or a dislike of even the briefest and most casual physical contact. Yet to be comforted, to be assured that we are valuable and important, we need to be touched. We need our hands to be shaken, our cheeks to be kissed, our shoulders to be embraced, with the quick sympathy and affection of friendship or of kinship.
Body | Church | Family | Fear | Love | Need | People | Sympathy | Terror | Friendship |
By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.
By sympathy with the happy, compassion for the sorrowful, delight in the holy, disregard of the unholy, the psychic nature moves to gracious peace.
Compassion | Nature | Sympathy |
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Despair | Melancholy | Pleasure | Sorrow | Sympathy | Tragedy |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
He made an elaborate plan of his treatise, and, with much erudition, discussed both coercive factors which are used to maintain society: wagedom and the different forms of coercion which are sanctioned by law. At the end of his work he reserved two paragraphs only to mention the two non-coercive factors — the feeling of duty and the feeling of mutual sympathy — to which he attached little importance, as might be expected from a writer in law.
People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as dogs are. Few people feel sympathy for rats. Yet rats are intelligent animals, and there can be no doubt that rats are capable of suffering and do suffer from countless painful experiments performed on them. If the army were to stop experiments on dogs and switch to rats instead, we should not be any less concerned.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
To give sympathy is sovereignty, to desire it from others is captivity.
The lost opportunities of the years since September 11 are the stuff of tragedy. Remember the people rallying in sympathy on the streets of Teheran, the famous headline - 'we are all Americans now.' Five years later much of the world wonders what America is now. As we face this landscape of failure and disorder, nothing is more urgent than for us to begin again to rebuild a bipartisan consensus to ensure our interests, increase our security and advance our values. It could well start with what our founders had in mind when they pledged 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind' in the Declaration of Independence. I think it's fair to say we are now all internationalists and we are all realists. This Administration's choices were false choices. Internationalism versus unilateralism. Realism versus idealism. Is there really any argument that America must remain a preeminent leader for peace and freedom, and yet we must be more willing to work in concert with other nations and international institutions to reach common goals? The American character is both idealistic and realistic: why can't our government reflect both?
Argument | Character | Failure | Famous | Government | Mind | Nations | Nothing | Peace | People | Respect | Security | Sympathy | Work | World | Government | Respect | Failure | Realism | Leader | Think |
This dying year will bear witness for or against us at the judgment. We sometimes say, "Time dies." Is time dead? No. The years die, but time lives. Time will live till the judgment, and then "Time shall be no longer." When time ends, eternity begins. The passing years are time's children, which will come from their graves to bear witness in the case pending between God and men at the great judgment-seat. Among the years which shall witness against us will be this dying year. If it shall be seen that in the year's record are written bright pages concerning us, happy shall we be. Pages which tell of toils for Jesus, of earnest prayers, of loyalty to God and conscience, of self-denials, of visitation of the sick, of sympathy for the distressed, of instruction of the ignorant--how many such things has the old year written for us?
Eternity | God | Happy | Loyalty | Loyalty | Men | Sympathy | Time | Will | Witness | Instruction | God | Old |
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
I feel so outside the general feeling. I have nothing in common with them, nor have they anything in sympathy with me.
Richard L. Evans, fully Richard Louis Evans
Give no man sympathy because he has to work - it is his blessing that he can.
People think of saints as people who lived an awfully long time ago and whose validity has disappeared. I think of them as people who didn't live such a long time ago, only a few hundred years or so. There must have been something about them that impressed people who were very much like me. What was it? And they must have been much more like somebody living today than we commonly think. What was behind it? What made these people special and what made a lot of other people regard them as special, either hating them or loving them? This is fascinating. It enlarges the whole world, and because it does so, it gives you great hope and sympathy with the future. You find yourself not an isolated miserable little wretch who has got seventy or eighty years to struggle along and then perish like nothing. You are the continuer of a very great tradition which you are going to pass on to the next lot. And you're right in the middle of the great stream of life. You see? Wonderful thing.
Hope | Little | People | Regard | Right | Struggle | Sympathy | Time | Tradition | Think |
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Sympathy |
Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need the society of kings.
Sympathy |
And what have our unions done? What do they aim to do? To improve the standard of life, to uproot ignorance and foster education, to instill character, manhood and independent spirit among our people; to bring about a recognition of the interdependence of man upon his fellow man. We aim to establish a normal work-day, to take the children from the factory and workshop and give them the opportunity of the school and the play-ground. In a word, our unions strive to lighten toil, educate their members, make their homes more cheerful, and in every way contribute an earnest effort toward making life the better worth living.
Men | Organization | Sympathy |
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus... would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?
Blame | Example | Individual | Literature | Men | Music | Past | Sympathy | Will | Understand |