This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Katharine Hepburn, fully Katharine Houghton Hepburn
You can’t change the music of your soul.
Listen to your favorite music. I’m a big advocate of letting patients listen to music through headphones while they are asleep during surgery. It’s been reported they wake up more clearheaded and calm than other patients
Music |
Does music make plants grow, or are there among the plans some that are musical?
Music |
The roots of reason are embedded in feelings – feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion.
Belief | Feelings | Opinion | Personality | Reason | Strength | Weakness |
Meaning is at the core of the creative process and of storytelling… When it is our own life story we are telling or a story from our lives, we become aware that we are not the victims of random and chaotic circumstances, that we, too, despite our grief or feelings of insignificance, are living meaningfully in a meaningful universe.
Circumstances | Feelings | Grief | Insignificance | Life | Life | Meaning | Story | Universe |
The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.
Despair | Joy | Life | Life | Music | Phenomena | Reality | Sadness | Silence |
When the anonymous masses enter history, it is chiefly to be slaughtered in battle, to die of famine or privation – to illustrate the failures of their betters… We have the mighty pyramids, but no firsthand account of the feelings of the wretches who built them.
We pay a terrible price for not forgiving. Unfortunately, the people whom we hold responsible for these unfinished feelings usually don’t suffer because of our feelings.
The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true; It does create a sense of comradeship, which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War, for those who enter into combat, has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the "lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning.
Alienation | Beauty | Bible | Cause | Diversion | Feelings | Life | Life | Lust | Meaning | Nobility | Self | Sense | Time | War | Bible |
Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion.
Delusion | Difficulty | Feelings | Self | Self-deception |