This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our hearts deceive us, because we leave them to themselves, are absent from them, taken up in outward rules and forms of living and praying. But this kind of praying, which takes all its thoughts and words only from the state of our hearts, makes it impossible for us to be strangers to ourselves. The strength of every sin, the power of every evil temper, the most secret workings of our hearts, the weakness of any or all our virtues, is with a noonday clearness forced to be seen, as soon as the heart is made our prayer book, and we pray nothing, but according to what we read, and find there.
Distinction | Glory | God | Grace | Haste | Man | Nature | Piety | Religion | Service | Spirit | Will | God | Old |
William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne
Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse.
Absurd | Circumstances | Contrast | Conversation | Friend | Language | Learning | Lord | Method | Reason | Spirit | Strength | Wonder | World |
The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower noes which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary melting moods into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have come to stay.
Action | Faith | Man | Nature | Necessity | Present | Truth | Will |
One was there who left all his friends behind; who going inland ever more and more, and being left quite alone, at last did find a lonely valley sheltered from the wind, wherein, amidst an ancient cypress wood, a long-deserted ruined castle stood.
Attention | Cause | Danger | Earth | Man | Men | Peace | Society | War | Society | Danger |
A sermon on a hat: "'The hat, my boy, the hat, whatever it may be, is in itself nothing--makes nothing, goes for nothing; but, be sure of it, everything is life depends upon the cock of the hat.' For how many men--we put it to your own experience, reader--have made their way through the thronging crowds that beset fortune, not by the innate worth and excellence of their hats, but simply, as Sampson Piebald has it, by 'the cock of their hats'? The cock's all."
Present |
Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it.
Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.
Plenty of people despise money, but few know how to give it away.
O momentary grace of mortal men, which we more hunt for than the grace of God! Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks, lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, ready, with every nod, to tumble down into the fatal bowels of the deep.
Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.
Compensation | Evil | Good |
O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us! Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt, since riches point to misery and contempt?
Man |