This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Where there is no anguish in the heart there will be no great music on the lips.
Who would have guessed that, thanks to all the ingenious tie-ins between advertising, entertainment, the popular arts, and the great corporations, the time would come when one of the most obvious aspects of the condition of the average American man is simply this: Most of the news he hears, most of the music he listens to, and most of the drama he witnesses - in fact almost all the intellectual or artistic experience he ever has - is provided by medicine shows.
Advertising | Entertainment | Experience | Man | Music | News | Time |
Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments: even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.
Appearance | Despair | Difficulty | Harmony | Individual | Life | Life | Music | Play | Wonder |
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist - this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul - a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
Art | Day | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Music | Past | Play | Present | Soul | Art |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Scurrility has no object in view but incivility; if it is uttered from feelings of petulance, it is mere abuse; if it is spoken in a joking manner, it may be considered raillery.
Abuse | Feelings | Incivility | Object |
Work has to include our deepest values and passions and feelings and commitments, or it's not work, it's just a job. A job is something to pay our bills with. Work is something that touches our heart and expresses our being. That joy is the key to spirit.
Mere knowledge alone will not enable us to solve the profound problems of life... Sympathy is an essential part of a right attitude to the riddles of the universe. You must tune up your heart to catch the music of the spheres.
Heart | Knowledge | Life | Life | Music | Problems | Right | Sympathy | Universe | Will |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
Attention | Control | Energy | Experience | Feelings | Important |
Most people will go to their graves with their music still in them.
How do you find the happiness that you want?... Do those things which give you the deepest, most exquisite feelings of joy... It isn’t what you do for yourself that really makes you happy, though it may give you justifiable pleasure, but what you do for others.
It is impossible to combat enthusiasm with reason; for though it makes a show of resistance, it soon eludes the pressure, refers you to distinctions not to be understood, and feelings which it cannot explain.
Enthusiasm | Feelings | Reason |
When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs... and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song, in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul.
Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Music | Passion | Play | Soul | Spirit | Waste |
He gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe; and science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; and music lifted up the listening spirit until it walked, except from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound.
Care | Earth | Heaven | Listening | Man | Mind | Mortal | Music | Science | Sound | Speech | Spirit | Thought | Universe |