This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
There is always another country and always another place. There is always another name and another face. And the name and the face are you, and you The name and the face, and the stream you gaze into Will show the adoring face, show the lips that lift to you As you lean with the implacable thirst of self, As you lean to the image which is yourself, To set the lip to lip, fix eye on bulging eye, To drink not of the stream but of your deep identity, But water is water and it flows, Under the image on the water the water coils and goes And its own beginning and its end only the water knows. There are many countries and the rivers in them -Cumberland, Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Pecos, Little Big Horn, And Roll, Missouri, roll. But there is only water in them. And in the new country and in the new, place The eyes of the new friend will reflect the new face And his mouth will speak to frame The syllables of the new name And the name is you and is the agitation of the air And is the wind and the wind runs and the wind is everywhere. The name and the face are you. And they are you. Are new. For they have been dipped in the healing flood. For they have been dipped in the redeeming blood. For they have been dipped in Time And Time is only beginnings Time is only and always beginnings And is the redemption of our crime And is our Saviour's priceless blood. For Time is always the new place, And no-place. For Time is always the new name and the new face, And no-name and no-face. For Time is motion For Time is innocence For Time is West.
Agitation | Beginning | Friend | Little | Redemption | Time | Will |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Send forth Thy messenger, Thy interpreter, And let him do wonders with signs and happenings, To cleanse us this night from scandal and defamation! Great God, boundless and unsearchable, Thy righteousness is like mighty mountains, Thy judgments are like the great deep. Bare to Thee and spied out is the heart’s imagination and secret, Lo, shaped in iniquity, how shall man justify the evil of his work? Can the grains of his dust justify it that were accounted vanity even while he was still in being? How then after he has perished and every element passed back to its source, When he is driven like chaff before the wind and like smoke from the lattice? Who shall stand up for Thy people, and who set them free? If for decision Thou shouldst draw nigh them, and if for judgment Thou shouldst take them, Then judge them, I pray Thee, by Thy righteousness, And reprove them not according to Thy wrath. For what is the weak that he should contend with the mighty, And how can dry stubble stand in the flame? Lo, as the flower fadeth and the wind flitteth by like a shadow, So flesh from spirit is rent asunder; If then Thou wilt stir up chastisement, There is no way of deliverance shouldst Thou press hard; For the worker is sluggish, And the day short and the work abundant.
Day | Deeds | Dread | Fear | Glory | God | Good | Lord | People | Praise | Redemption | Sound | Time | Will | Deeds | God | Old |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
GOD AND ISRAEL - God: Though bereaved and in mourning, why sit thus in tears? Shall thy spirit surrender its hopes to its fears? Though the end has been long and no light yet appears, Hope on, hapless one, a while longer. I will send thee an angel My path to prepare, On the brow of Mount Zion thy King to declare, The Lord ever regnant shall reign again there, Thy King, O proclaim, comes to Zion. Israel: How long, O my God, shall I wait Thee in vain? How long shall Thy people in exile remain? Shall the sheep ever shorn never utter their pain But dumbly through all go on waiting? p. 23 God: Have faith, hapless one, I will pardon and free, Not always shalt thou be abhorrent to Me, But be Mine e’en as I shall return unto thee, ’Tis yet but a little space longer. Israel: How long till the turn of my fate shall draw near, How long ere the sealed and the closed be made clear, And the palace of strangers a roof shall appear? God: Hope on for a shelter and refuge. With healing shall yet thy entreaties be graced, As when Caphtor was crushed shalt thou triumph re-taste, And the flowers cast off shall re-bloom in the waste, Hope on but a little space longer. Israel: My people of yore ’neath one people was drowned, But from Egypt or Babel deliverance found, But now we are hopelessly compassed around By four birds of prey grim and speckled. They have eaten my flesh, yet to leave me are loath. p. 24 God: The Rock you must trust to remember His oath, Your lover that went shall return to His troth, Hope on, hapless one, a whit longer.
God | Redemption | Righteousness | God |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
My heart craves to praise Thee, But I am unable. Would my understanding Were as spacious as Solomon’s. Without it my wisdom As yet ill suffices For expounding Thy wonders And Thy deeds of beneficence Wrought for me and all mankind. Without Thee all’s hopeless, And where is the rock Sustaining, suspending The weight of the world? I am as one orphaned; Nay, on Thee I am cast. What then can I do But look to Thee, wait on Thee, In whose hand is the spirit Of all that is living, In whose hand is the breath Of all the creation?
Awe | Day | Earth | Ecstasy | Faith | God | Lord | Love | Loyalty | Loyalty | Man | Melody | Mission | Peace | People | Purpose | Purpose | Redemption | Reverence | Sacred | Service | Trust | Unique | Vows | Wonder | World | Worship | God | Blessed |
Even if the weight of carrying people’s hopes and pains may fall mainly, for a time, on one person’s shoulders, leadership cannot be exercised alone. The lone-warrior model of leadership is heroic suicide. Each of us had blind spots that require the vision of others. Each of us has passions that need to be contained by others.
Attention | Children | Individual | Rank | Rest | Study | Time | Child |
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux NULL
He that will teach himself in school, becomes a scholar to a fool.
Merit | Price | Redemption |
Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL
The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity.
Our Sages were enemies of ignorance. They regarded education, intellectual enlightenment, and the acquisition of knowledge as the first of all moral commandments. They viewed the dissemination of intellectual enlightenment among all classes of the population as the prime concern of the nation, and the training of a child's mind as the first and most sacred duty of fatherhood. They considered it a matter of conscience for every Jewish father to see that his child should not remain a boor and am ha'arets; no Jewish child must be allowed to grow up as an ignorant, uneducated person.
Children | Evil | Fulfillment | Isolation | Nations | Need | Obligation | Order | People | Practice | Praise | Purpose | Purpose | Redemption | Vows | Torah |
My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.
Acceptance | Man | Opposition | Poverty | Redemption |
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Change |
Rudra is truly one; for the knowers of Brahman do not admit the existence of a second, He alone rules all the worlds by His powers. He dwells as the inner Self of every living being. After having created all the worlds, He, their Protector, takes them back into Himself at the end of time.
Illusion | Individual | Knowledge | Meditation | Self |
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
Assertion | Bible | Body | Credit | Custom | Danger | Desire | Dogma | Faith | Giving | Humanity | Impossibility | Innovation | Invention | Life | Life | Lord | Man | Means | Men | Present | Regard | Right | Sin | Teach | Unity | Will | Writing | Danger | Bible | Learn | Old |
Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth.
Achievement | Earth | Energy | Existence | Nothing | Story | Will |
The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the Sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.
Alienation | Consciousness | Events | Experience | Meaning | Perception | Redemption | World |
To a large extent our difficulties are a difficulty of language. People fail to realize that language is multivalent and also, particularly, that when a person uses a word like ‘rights’, for the non-human world, they think ‘rights’ is a single continuum… ‘Rights’ is an analogous term. It is an analogous term. It is alike and different. Like a person says – “A tree has rights” – the tree doesn’t have human rights because human rights would be no good for a tree. A tree needs tree rights. Birds need bird rights. Plants need plant rights. This whole question of law and rights needs to recognize what we call the diversity within the continuity. It is a difference of quality, not of quantity. So, it is not that the humans have more or less. Humans don’t have more rights than birds do. They have different rights. So that it’s this capacity to recognize difference that pervades just an enormous amount of human affairs.
Attention | Life | Life | Little | Mission | Past | Reconciliation | Redemption | Relationship | Time |
If virtuous, the government need not fear the fair operation of attack and defense. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting the truth, either in religion, law, or politics.
Credit | Patriotism | Preference | Public | Redemption |