This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them… Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Our knowledge of God is paradoxically not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion, as we are known to him that we find our real being. We know him in and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence.
Absolute | Business | Glory | God | Little | Love | Mind | Poverty | Will | Business | God |
They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
Feelings | God | Impatience | Important | Poverty | Resentment | Time | God |
Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
Forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance.
Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the laboring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.
Poverty |
How rev'rend is the face of this tall pile, whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, to bear aloft its arch'd and pond'rous roof! By its own weight made steadfast and immovable. Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe and terror to my aching sight! The tombs and monumental caves of death look cold, and shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.
That, however, does not render the poetry as a failure or as an irrelevance. It only affirms that alternatives to the lethal reductionism of empire require imagination and courage and staying power. In that ancient world, it was required that old Jerusalem be relinquished and new Jerusalem be undertaken. It is no less required now that there be relinquishing and undertaking. Those who act in this way will do so at the behest of the poets who may eventually be seen as Spirit led.
I can never see my old friend again— the river Han still streams to the east I might question some old man of his place— river and hills—empty is Tsaichou.
It is remarkable that circumcision, which is invariably practiced by the Mahometans, and forms a distinguishing rite of their faith, to which all proselytes must conform, is neither mentioned in the Koran nor the Sonna. It seems to have been a general usage in Arabia, tacitly adopted from the Jews, and is even said to have been prevalent throughout the East before the time of Moses. It is said that the Koran forbids the making likenesses of any living thing, which has prevented the introduction of portrait-painting among Mahometans. The passage of the Koran, however, which is thought to contain the prohibition, seems merely an echo of the second commandment, held sacred by Jews and Christians, not to form images or pictures for worship. One of Mahomet's standards was a black eagle. Among the most distinguished Moslem ornaments of the Alhambra at Granada is a fountain supported by lions carved of stone, and some Moslem monarchs have had their effigies stamped on their coins.
In contentment I still feel the need for imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs hang always heavy in that perfect sky, unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, with rivers like our own that seek for seas they never find, the same receding shores that never touch with inarticulate pang?
The hand between the candle and the wall grows large on the wall. The mind between this light or that and space, (this man in a room with an image of the world, that woman waiting for the man she loves,) grows large against space.
It was soldiers went marching over the rocks and still the birds came, came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come. No doubt that soldiers had to be marching and that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Inequality | Man | Men | Poverty |