This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke
The Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, the soul of man is immortal... the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all... the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.
Character | Good | Love | Man | Soul | Universe | Work | World | Happiness |
The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system, a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include al the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities, and indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.
Character | Experiment | Ignorance | Indolence | Love | Mind | Nature | Observation | Phenomena | Prejudice | Repose | Simplicity | System | Understanding | Will |
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon
If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Whoever undertakes a long Journey, if he be wise, makes it his Business to find out an agreeable Companion. How cautious then should He be, who is to take a Journey for Life, whose Fellow-Traveler must not part with him but at the Grave; his Companion at Bed and Board and Sharer of all the Pleasures and Fatigues of his Journey; as the Wife must be to the Husband! She is no such Sort of Ware, that a Man can be rid of when he pleases: When once that’s purchas’d, no Exchange, no Sale, no Alienation can be made: She is an inseparable Accident to Man: Marriage is a Noose, which, fasten’d about the Neck, runs the closer, and fits more uneasy by our struggling to get loose: ‘Tis a Gordian Knot which none can unty, and being twisted with our Thread of Life, nothing but the Schyth of Death can cut it.
Accident | Alienation | Business | Character | Death | Grave | Husband | Journey | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Nothing | Wife | Wise | Business |
How are such an infinite number of things placed with such order in the memory, notwithstanding the tumult, marches, and counter-marches of the animal spirits?
Contempt of all outward things that come in competition with duty fulfills the ideal of human greatness. It is sanctioned by conscience, that universal and eternal lawgiver, whose chief principle is, that everything must be yielded up for right.
Character | Competition | Conscience | Contempt | Duty | Eternal | Greatness | Right |
The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is that fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangement of a boundless Providence.
Character | Human nature | Man | Nature | Prayer | Providence |
Constitution of the Five Nations NULL
With endless patience you shall carry out your duty, and your firmness shall be tempered with tenderness for your people. Neither anger nor fury shall lodge in your mind, and all your words and actions shall be marked with calm deliberation. In all your deliberations in the Council, in your efforts at lawmaking, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion. Cast not away the warnings of any others, if they should chide you for any error or wrong you may do, but return to the way of the Great Law, which is just and right. Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the earth - the unborn of the future Nation.
Anger | Character | Deliberation | Duty | Earth | Error | Firmness | Fury | Future | Law | Mind | Oblivion | Patience | People | Present | Right | Self | Self-interest | Tenderness | Words | Wrong |
The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life.
Character | Existence | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Present | Tears | Virtue | Virtue | Worth |