This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing — ambiguity is a fact of life.
Experience | Journey | Respect | Time | Respect |
If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. There must be an organic unity between past and future lived in the present.
Experience | Feelings | Heart | Little | Need | Past | People | Will | Work | Value |
Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. If we thought about it for two consecutive minutes, we would not want it that way. If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.
Children | Experience | Wisdom | Old |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
None of us can help the things life has done to us. TheyÂ’re done before you realize it, and once theyÂ’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what youÂ’d like to be, and youÂ’ve lost your true self forever.
Contempt | Experience | Father |
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations called holiness.
Age | Experience | Future | God | Old age | People | Soul | Spirit | Study | Theology | God | Old |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
I like the way you always manage to state the obvious with a sense of real discovery.
Will |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.
Experience | Time |
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I put the words down and push them a bit.
Experience | Time | Parting |
Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
Music is about communication... it isn't just something that maybe physically sounds good or orally sounds interesting; it's something far, far deeper than that.
Contrast | Experience |
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Blessings | Experience |
Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others.
Experience | Religion | Spirit | Afraid |
Theories of what is true have their day. They come and go, leave their deposit in the common stock of knowledge, and are supplanted by other more convincing theories. The thinkers and investigators of the world are pledged to no special theory, but feel themselves free to search for the greater truth beyond the utmost limits of present knowledge. So likewise in the field of moral truth, it is our hope, that men in proportion as they grow more enlightened, will learn to hold their theories and their creeds more loosely, and will none the less, nay, rather all the more be devoted to the supreme end of practical righteousness to which all theories and creeds must be kept subservient. There are two purposes then which we have in view: To secure in the moral and religious life perfect intellectual liberty, and at the same time to secure concert in action. There shall be no shackles upon the mind, no fetters imposed in early youth which the growing man or woman may feel prevented from shaking off, no barrier set up which daring thought may not transcend. And on the other hand there shall be unity of effort, the unity that comes of an end supremely prized and loved, the unity of earnest, morally aspiring persons, engaged in the conflict with moral evil.
Aid | Cause | Culture | Evolution | Experience | Faith | Force | Humanity | Life | Life | Mankind | Morality | Nature | Optimism | Past | Peace | Pessimism | Power | Will |
Poor men do penance for rich men's sins.
Experience | Openness | People | Personality | Safe |
The eye of the master fattens the horse.
Experience | Life | Life | Principles | Psychology | Time | Youth | Youth |
Never judge by appearances; Judge not a man and things at first sight.
Control | Experience |