This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
At the window he sits and looks out, musing on the river, a little brown hen duck paddling upstream among the wind waves close to the far bank. What he has understood lies behind him like a road in the woods. He is a wilderness looking out at the wild.
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Little | Patience | Sacred | Silence | Time | Words | Poem |
What works poorly in agriculture — monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting — can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugated nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Church, in speaking of punishment for sin, should have chosen the analogy of criminal law, for the analogy is incompatible with the Christian belief in God as the creator of Man. Criminal laws are laws, imposed on men, who are already in existence, with or without their consent, and, with the possible exception of capital punishment for murder, there is no logical relation between the nature of a crime and the penalty inflicted for committing it. If God created man, then the laws of man's spiritual nature must, like the laws of his physical nature, be laws -- laws, that is to say, which he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by getting drunk -- and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover. To state spiritual laws in the imperative -- Thou shalt love God with all thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is simply a pedagogical technique, as when a mother says to her small son, Stay away from the window! because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls out of it.
Why have they never studied or questioned the necessity or the justice of the sanitation laws that have been used to destroy such markets?
Silence |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire.
Body | Death | Man | Memory | Mind | Mourning | Silence | Words | Happiness |
You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
There was neither voice nor crested image, no chorister, nor priest. There was only the great height of the rock and the two of them standing still to rest.
Noise |
That other one wanted to think his way to life, sure that the ultimate poem was the mind, or of the mind, or of the mind in these Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind; half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky, half desire for indifference about the sky.
Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, but spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, conceiving words, as the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence, and out of their droning sibilants makes a serenade.
Noise |
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
The country habit has me by the heart, for he's bewitched forever who has seen, not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun, as each man knows the life that fits him best, the shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone, and after ranging on a tentative flight stoops like the merlin to the constant lure.
Silence |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute
A tender, loving concern for all living creatures will need to arise and reign in our hearts if any of us is to survive. And our lives will be truly blessed only when the misery of one is genuinely felt to be the misery of all. The force of love is the force of total revolution. It is the unreleased force, unknown and unexplored as a dynamic for change.
I am a simple person, a human being who has loved life and who has seen life as divinity itself. I have lived in love with life, madly in love with the human expression of life as divinity!
Silence |
The thoughts cannot be suppressed nor can they be thrown away anywhere, you can only watch them, not naming them as good or bad. Then you are free from the roles of an experiencer and an actor, you enter into the state of an observer of non-reactional attention.
Awareness | Learning | Mind | Observation | Self-reliance | Silence | Awareness |
Generally we waste energy in unessential secondary things. This criminal waste leaves us tired and troubled at the end of the day. An overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and you begin the next day with a sluggish body and a lethargic mind.