This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.
Attention | Change | Control | Death | Ego | God | Heart | Important | Life | Life | Light | Little | Love | Marriage | Mind | People | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Relationship | Right | Soul | Space | Time | Universe | Will | God | Afraid | Think | Understand |
Cease participation, if only for one day this year --- if only to make sure that we don't lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating ease.
Heart |
Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours, Makes the night morning and the noontide night: Princes have but their titles for their glories, An outward honor for an inward toil; And for unfelt imaginations They often feel a world of restless cares; So that between their titles and low name There's nothing differs but the outward fame. Richard III, Act i, Scene 4
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life, struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–' 'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, and none was left to love in all the world.
We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, drastic change of character that we have to renounce our individuality. To know God, you only need to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God
You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two...But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look thorough your heart, instead
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering against my tremulous hands which loose the string and let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, -- he wished to have me in his sight once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring to come and touch my hand ... a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! -- this... the paper's light... said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed as if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paled with lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availed if, what this said, I dared repeat at last!
That you should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong instead.
Heart |
When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, What was I thinking? and the answer is usually: You weren’t. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness narcissistic love. I call it my twenties.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The critics say that epics have died out with Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; I'll not believe it. I could never deem as Payne Knight did, that Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men: -his Helen's hair turned grey like any plain Miss Smith's who wears a front; And Hector's infant whimpered at a plume as yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes: every age, heroic in proportions, double faced, looks backward and before, expects a morn and claims an epos.
The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Or from Browning some Pomegranate, which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.