This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star, she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
Acceptance | Heaven |
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
The builder of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is, the public nature, should fall out: the public and the private element, like north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be subdued except the soul is dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.
God | Heart | Heaven | Nature | Public | Religion | Soul | God |
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Belief | Courage | Daring | Energy | History | Hope | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Oppression | Time |
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n.
Belief | Change | Courage | Daring | Energy | Events | Greatness | History | Man | Oppression | Time | Will | Work |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
What is hell? To live in slavery to others. How is heaven attained? The attainment of heaven is the freedom from cravings. What is a person’s duty? To do good to all beings. What are worthless as soon as they are won? Honor and fame. What brings happiness? The friendship of the holy. What destroys craving? Realization of one’s true self. Who are our enemies? Our sense-organs, when they are uncontrolled. Who are our friends? Our sense-organs, when they are controlled. Who has overcome the world? He who has conquered his own mind.
Attainment | Duty | Fame | Freedom | Good | Heaven | Hell | Honor | Mind | Self | Sense | Slavery | World | Friendship |
Sherwood Eddy, born George Sherwood Eddy
Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence. Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences.
Consequences | Daring | Evidence | Faith |
A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of the life and the duty of life.
Courage | Daring | Duty | Endurance | Fear | Ideals | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Misfortune | Usefulness |
Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider, nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth, for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, Who is created above all things.
Better | Earth | God | Heaven | Love | Nothing | Rest | God |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries bring us farther from God and nearer to dust.
It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at last fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Achievement | Better | Cause | Credit | Critic | Daring | Deeds | Defeat | Man | Deeds |
It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God’s heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations.
Day | Death | Difficulty | God | Heart | Heaven | Hero | Life | Life | Man | Taste | Wrong |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work which you despise, which bores you and which the world does not need – this life is hell.
Despise | Heaven | Hell | Life | Life | Need | Work | World |
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: words, without thoughts, never to heaven go!
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Earth | Heaven | Philosophy |