This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.
Trust thyself. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
Age | Eternal | Events | Genius | Heart | Men | Perception | Providence | Society | Trust | Society |
Ideas define our place in the universe, our relations with other people; ideas determine what is important and what is not important, what is fair and what is not fair, what is worth believing and what is not worth believing. Ideas give life meaning.
Ideas | Important | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Universe | Worth |
There is a soul at the center of nature, and over the will of every man... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.
Contentment | Effort | Man | Nature | Power | Right | Soul | Truth | Will | Wisdom |
The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word... Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.
Contentment | Effort | Faith | Guidance | Life | Life | Listening | Need | Power | Right | Teach | Truth | Wisdom | Guidance |
Examining attentively that which I was, I saw that I could conceive that I had no body, and that there was no world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could not for all that conceive that I was not. On the contrary, I saw from the very fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it very evidently and certainly followed that I was; on the other hand if I had only ceased from thinking, even if all the rest of what I had ever imagined had really existed, I should have no reason for thinking that I had existed. From that I knew that I was a substance the whole essence or nature of which is to think, and that for its existence there is no need of any place, nor does it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and is even more easy to know than is the latter; and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.
Body | Existence | Nature | Need | Reason | Rest | Soul | Thinking | Thought | Truth | World | Thought |
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all.
Action | Earth | Ignorance | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Men | Nothing | Thought | Will | Woman | Work | World | Old | Thought |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
Justice is the only worship. Love is the only priest. Ignorance is the only slavery. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here, the way to be happy is to make others so.
Good | Happy | Ignorance | Justice | Love | Slavery | Time | Worship | Happiness |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make other so.
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
The event of creation did not take place so many kalpas or eons ago, astronomically or biologically speaking. Creation is taking place every moment of our lives.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point , the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. The inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and outer compulsion, yet surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light still and moving...
Action | Desire | Freedom | Future | Grace | Light | Past | Sense | Suffering | Time | World |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one.
Beginning | Children | Earth | Heart | Simplicity | Time | Will |
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 |
This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in.
Man is, properly speaking based upon hope; he has no other possession but hope; this world of his is emphatically the place of hope.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash-heap or the dump.
Earth | Future | Good | Hope | Inevitable | Land | Nothing | Present | Property | Survival | Thought | Worth | Thought | Value |