This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Whoever undertakes a long Journey, if he be wise, makes it his Business to find out an agreeable Companion. How cautious then should He be, who is to take a Journey for Life, whose Fellow-Traveler must not part with him but at the Grave; his Companion at Bed and Board and Sharer of all the Pleasures and Fatigues of his Journey; as the Wife must be to the Husband! She is no such Sort of Ware, that a Man can be rid of when he pleases: When once that’s purchas’d, no Exchange, no Sale, no Alienation can be made: She is an inseparable Accident to Man: Marriage is a Noose, which, fasten’d about the Neck, runs the closer, and fits more uneasy by our struggling to get loose: ‘Tis a Gordian Knot which none can unty, and being twisted with our Thread of Life, nothing but the Schyth of Death can cut it.
Accident | Alienation | Business | Character | Death | Grave | Husband | Journey | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Nothing | Wife | Wise | Business |
Henry Wotton, fully Sir Henry Wotton
Virtue is the roughest way, but proves at night a bed of down.
The children who go to bed hungry in a Harlem slum or a West Virginia mining town are not being deprived because no food can be found to give them; they are going to bed hungry because, despite all our miracles of invention and production, we have not yet found a way to make necessities of life available to all of our citizens - including those whose failure is not lack of personal industry or initiative, but only an unwise choice of parents.
Children | Choice | Failure | Industry | Initiative | Invention | Life | Life | Miracles | Parents | Wisdom | Failure |
Who never ate his bread with tears, who never sat weeping on his bed during care-ridden nights knows you not, your heavenly powers.
Somehow feminists who want to transform our culture, not just adapt to it, have to convince young women that embracing feminism does not mean embracing victimhood, that you can be for others and still be for yourself, that you can “make it” in bed and in the marketplace, that women can indeed be visible without subjugating their souls behind traditional female - or male - masks.
George Halas, fully George Stanley Halas, Sr., nicknamed "Papa Bear" and "Mr. Everything"
Always go to bed a winner.
Wisdom |
The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality, to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations - the relation between the creature and his Creator.
Contemplation | Death | Individuality | Wisdom | Contemplation |
The fact of our being able to form abstract or universal ideas is, in itself, a proof of the immateriality, or, as it is technically called, the spirituality of the soul, a proof that the soul is, in its essence, independent of matter.
Abstract | Ideas | Soul | Spirituality |
To glorify God is to be engaged in a concrete spirituality that refuses to draw marked distinctions between sacred and secular, contemplation and deed, theology and ethics.
Contemplation | Ethics | God | Sacred | Spirituality | Theology | God | Contemplation |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Therapy offers explanations; spirituality offers forgiveness.
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
The core paradox that underlies spirituality is the haunting sense of incompleteness, of being somehow unfinished, that comes from the reality of living on this earth as part and yet also not-part of it. For to be human is to be incomplete, yet year for completion; it is to be uncertain, yet long for certainty; to be imperfect, yet long for perfection; to be broken, yet crave wholeness. All these yearnings remain necessarily unsatisfied, for perfection, completion, certainty, and wholeness are impossible precisely because we are imperfectly human – or better, because we are perfectly human, which is to say humanly imperfect.
Better | Earth | Paradox | Perfection | Reality | Sense | Spirituality | Wholeness | Yearnings |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Stories reveal a spirituality that views life not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived.
Life | Life | Mystery | Spirituality |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
Truth, wisdom, goodness, beauty, the fragrance of a rose – all resemble spirituality in that they are intangible, ineffable realities.
Beauty | Spirituality | Truth | Wisdom |