This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.
Body | Earth | Fear | Glory | Life | Life | Man | Morality | Pain | Religion | Self-denial | Sorrow | Soul | Struggle |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
Art | Change | Danger | Darkness | Doubt | Dreams | Grief | Guile | Hate | Heart | Hope | Liberty | Life | Life | Pain | Quiet | Reason | Suffering | Suspicion | Thankfulness | Trust | Truth | World | Danger | Art |
I do not believe in God, because I believe in man. Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years been working to undo the botched job your god has made.
Cause | Convention | Freedom | Life | Life |
I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love, and freedom in motherhood.
Cause | Convention | Death | Force | Freedom | Frivolity | Grave | Life | Life | Mind | Right | World |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.
Distress | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Past | Rest | Safe | Tears | Think |
Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
Earth | Force | Gold | Life | Life | Little | Love | Magic | Man | Power | World |
Served as inspiration for Roger Baldwin, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Change | Improvement | Life | Life | Price | Revolution | Struggle | Worth | Loss |
Atheism... in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Cause | Convention | Death | Force | Freedom | Frivolity | Grave | Life | Life | Mind | Right | World |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.
Duty | Earth | Eternity | Happy | Hell | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Peculiarity | Repose |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I think there are ghosts that roam the world, I know. Stay always with me, in the form you want, fool me again! But the only thing you can do is leave me alone in this abyss where I cannot find you.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I am the only being whose doom no tongue would ask no eye would mourn I never caused a thought of gloom a smile of joy since I was born in secret pleasure — secret tears this changeful life has slipped away as friendless after eighteen years as lone as on my natal day.
Earth | Eternity | Happy | Hell | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Repose |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
So he'll never know how much love: not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself, than I own. I do not know that our souls are made, but they are equal, and Linton is as different from mine as a moonbeam is different from lightning, fire or ice.
Cause | Danger | Distinction | Enough | Existence | Fear | Heart | Life | Life | Regard | Sincerity | Danger | Trouble | Think |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
And wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Distinction | Heart | Life | Life | Regard | Society | Society |