This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to them. Once the chorus of cultural values was full of ministers, teachers, neighbors, leaders. They demanded more conformity, but offered more support. Now the messengers are violent cartoon characters, rappers and celebrities selling sneakers. Parents are considered "responsible" only if they are successful in their resistance. That's what makes child-raising harder. It's not just that American families have less time with their kids; it's that we have to spend more of this time doing battle with our own culture.
People | Sense | Skepticism |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of they soul move still, oh, still, beside me.
If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
Value is given to our little limited lives. Our days are reckoned as movements in the sweep of the centuries. Their faint note belongs to the ocean of song to which worlds and ages have contributed. Our doings help and hinder, spread or retard, the pulsations of the universe's heart. We are a part of the eternities and have a part to play in their orchestrated symphonic movement.
Energy | Philosophy | Sense | Truth |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
Only they have to weep bitter tears who know what has come to them is the result of their foolish conduct, their ignorant way, their want of proper understanding of life and what love means.
Books | Character | Common Sense | Force | Righteousness | Rites | Salvation | Sense | System | World | Happiness |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
For the spiritual sense of the Word treats everywhere of the spiritual world, that is, of the state of the church in the heavens, as well as in the earth; hence the Word is spiritual and Divine.
Sense |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.
Man started out on the wrong foot. the misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. ’T is the majority in this, as all, prevails....Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye; much sense the starkest madness. ’T is the majority in this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous, and handled with a chain.
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Sense |
In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.
Despair | Destroy | Effort | Good | Honor | Innocence | Life | Life | Man | Men | Office | Order | People | Public | Society | War | Society |