This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captain of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
Experience | Life | Life | Past |
I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses.
Divinity | Experience | God | World | God | Learn | Understand |
I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.
Absolute | Acceptance | Eternal | Experience | Forgiveness | God | Universe | Forgiveness | God | Forgive |
You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions.
Divinity | Effort | Experience |
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls
My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become THE imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.
Dawn | Experience | People |
We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Experience | Growth |
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.
Life | Life | Little | Passion | Pity | Time | Tragedy | Youth | Youth |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
First I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist.
I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.
Birth | Ends | Experience | Heart | Men | Parents | Plan | Tenderness | Think |
Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man.
Abundance | Body | Conversation | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Meditation | Money | Need | People | Reading | Spirit | Time | World | Think | Understand |
Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.
Experience | History |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
Experience | Child |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
For that mist may break when the sun is high and this soul forget its sorrow and the rose ray of the closing day may promise a brighter ‘morrow.
Corruption | Enough | Experience | Grief | Hope | Mankind | Mind | Mortal | Trust | Truth | Youth | Youth | Think |
When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be.
Change | Conduct | Convictions | Day | Destiny | Experience | Feelings | Life | Life | Pious | Story | Think |