This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.
Solitude |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
As God sets the soul in this dark night… He allows it not to find attraction or sweetness in anything whatsoever. God transfers to the spirit the good things and the strength of the senses… if it is not immediately conscious of spiritual sweetness and delight, but only of aridity and lack of sweetness, the reason for this is the strangeness of the exchange. #6. If those souls to whom this comes to pass knew how to be quiet at this time… then they would delicately experience this inward refreshment in that ease and freedom from care… it is like the air which, if one would close one’s hand upon it, escapes. In this state of contemplation… it is God Who is now working in the soul. He binds its interior faculties, and allows it not to cling to the understanding, nor to have delight in the will, nor to reason with the memory. God communicates… by pure spirit. From this time forward imagination and fancy can find no support in any meditation.
Contemplation | Darkness | Faith | God | Grace | Heart | Love | Meditation | Noise | Order | Pleasure | Practice | Progress | Rest | Sense | Silence | Solitude | Soul | Thought | Understanding | Will | God | Contemplation | Obstacle | Thought |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it be that of the greatest sinner in the world, and this union is natural. The supernatural union exists when God’s will and the soul’s will are in conformity. Therefore the soul rests transformed in God through love. The illumination of the soul and its union with God corresponds to its purity.
Attentiveness | Father | God | Light | Nothing | Solitude | Soul | Spirit | Will | God |
Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
Desolation is a file, and the endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.
Aspiration | God | Inclination | Knowing | Life | Life | Love | Progress | Regard | Sense | Solitude | Soul | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Aspiration | God |
Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal.
Books | Choice | Conscience | Deeds | Earth | God | Heart | Lesson | Life | Life | Little | Loneliness | Mankind | Mind | Nature | Prejudice | Solitude | Study | Truth | Will | Words | Deeds | God |
During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.
Opposition | Solitude | Will |
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
Solitude | Friendship |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
My style will acquire a specific character from the moment when it will not bother anything, to be exact, will not sleep. directly to court a woman that is the dumbest thing you want. That's why a woman would only untouched by vanity. and vanity of women is common place all philosophers. A and B are two sisters: If you like A like you really need to start by making court's B. .. arriving at the inn, I found there two rosy-cheeked young girl. both were nice. I grabbed her ass in the least pretty, I could have [..] but I thought it would be imprudent at the very beginning of the campaign. anyway I wasted all that melancholy which gnawed at me since I left and I was happy Pforzheim to Stuttgart. during his life the way I read Alfieri, vol 2. pretend you're a month or two but eventually all true character is revealed: we women do not necessarily hold. Martial had between 18 and 31 years, about 22 women, 12 of whom indeed after an amorous intrigue. I am 25 years old and over 10 years I have probably 6 women. I have also 20 horses now and until I will not be able to ride because of age. spirit is it substance or quality - put together with the bodily eye, eye consequence of existence? Locke's principle that all ideas come to us through the senses, and passions anatomy as shown in Helvetius prove that man can not see any effect in the soul, there are only effects of the senses, that there seem consequent soul. these two portraits of the Emperor are really great, but made ??him Appian lighting. apparently not conceive otherwise genius painters. the superior understanding that surprise humanly possible real relations between things and events with a dominating cold caution, they remain invisible. inconsistency is found that the sensitivity, the author [Schiller] not sufficiently deepened major ideas at last that his characters I have enough spirit [esprit]. them except some lengths to end pieces are good. but sensitivity founded on a series of vague ideas and swollen, like that of Werther, it seems a consequence of a specific nation spirit, does not touch me. Well the Germans cold explaining their food: black bread, butter, milk and beer. coffee yet but should drink wine, and since most, for animate them bloated muscles. Bible reading and then helped her to be silly and emphatic. Because it's actually acting and the British character. but the greatest rulers of the 18th century, Frederick II and Catherine II, belonged to this nation. - Stendhal , The Private Diaries of Stendhal
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
The sovereign invigorator of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A state of conscience is higher than a state of innocence.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous-to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Some of necessities go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
The oldest language, they say, Indo-European, Indo-European, which is Sanskrit. But it is almost certain that this is a great is so rashly like many others, and that there has been a re-older mother tongue, which decided the roots of the Aryan both as well as the Semitic and chamitischen dialects in itself. She probably has been spoken on Atlantis, whose silhouette is the final distance indistinct haze still visible Vorbirgskulisse the past, but which itself is hardly the original home of the people speaking well.