This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.
Opinion | Reason | Right | Uncertainty | Wonder |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
There is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.
W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson
A Child's Portrait - Her face is hushed in perfect calm, Her lips half-open hint the psalm The angels sing, who wear God’s palm: And in her eyes a liquid light, With somewhat of a starry sheen, Comes welling upward from the white And vestal soul that throbs within. A golden tangle is her hair That holds the sunlight in its snare; And one pure lily she doth wear In her white robe: and she doth seem A flower-like creature, who will fade If suns strike down too rude a beam, Or winds blow roughly on her shade. The golden ladders of the Dawn Meet at her feet, where on the lawn She stands, in tender thought withdrawn: And little wonder would it be, If on those slanting stairs she trod, And, with one farewell smile toward me, Were caught into the smile of God.
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
If in spite of these facts we wish to maintain that mysticism is ultimately the source and essence of all religion, we shall have on our hands a set of problems very similar to those which beset the mystical theory of ethics. We shall have to maintain that mystical consciousness is latent in all men but is in most men submerged below the surface of consciousness. Just as it throws up into the upper consciousness influences which appear in the form of ethical feelings, so must its influences appear there in the form of religious impulses. And these in turn will give rise to the intellectual constructions which are the various creeds... The general conclusion regarding the relations between mysticism on the one hand and the area of organized religions (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) on the other is that mysticism is independent of all of them in the sense that it can exist without any of them. But mysticism and organized religion tend to be associated with each other and to become linked together because both look beyond earthly horizons to the Infinite and Eternal, and because both share the emotions appropriate to the sacred and the holy.
Absolute | Birth | Character | Consciousness | Death | Despair | Effort | Era | Faith | Individual | Influence | Man | Means | Mystical | Philosophy | Position | Power | Reality | Reason | Spirit | Struggle | Thought | Truth | Will | Wonder | Thought |
My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn. They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city in America equaled. Call it loyalty, and so it was. It would be a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers. Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi.
Chance | Equality | Incredulity | Men | Opportunity | Posterity | Will | Wonder | Think |
W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson
The Angel at the Ford - I sought to hold her, but within her eyes I read a new strange meaning; faint they prayed, “Oh, let me pass and taste the great surprise; Behold me not reluctant nor afraid!” “Nay, I will strive with God for this!” I cried, “As man with man, like Jacob at the brook, Only be thou, dear heart, upon my side!” “Be still,” she answered, “very still, and look!” And straightway I discerned with inward dread The multitudinous passing of white souls, Who paused, each one with sad averted head, And flashing of indignant aureoles.
Angels | Little | Smile | Soul | Thought | Will | Wonder | Thought |
Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
A Song : On The Green Margin - On the green margin of the brook, Despairing Phyllida reclined, Whilst every sigh, and every look, Declared the anguish of her mind. Am I less lovely then? (she cries, And in the waves her form surveyed); Oh yes, I see my languid eyes, My faded cheek, my colour fled: These eyes no more like lightning pierced, These cheeks grew pale, when Damon first His Phyllida betrayed. The rose he in his bosom wore, How oft upon my breast was seen! And when I kissed the drooping flower, Behold, he cried, it blooms again! The wreaths that bound my braided hair, Himself next day was proud to wear At church, or on the green. While thus sad Phyllida lamented, Chance brought unlucky Thyrsis on; Unwillingly the nymph consented, But Damon first the cheat begun. She wiped the fallen tears away, Then sighed and blushed, as who would say Ah! Thyrsis, I am won.
Aid | Books | Children | Day | Fidelity | Friend | Future | God | Important | Man | Merit | Power | Present | Promise | Providence | Purpose | Purpose | System | Will | Wonder | Yielding | God | Truths |
If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.
His frown was full of terror, and his voice shook the delinquent with such fits of awe as left him not, till penitence had won lost favor back again, and clos'd the breach.
Wonder |