This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Faith, love and sorrow are three elements that mysteriously blend in human experience, each having its own tale to tell of the relation which we bear to the Supreme Being.
Experience | Faith | Love | Sorrow | Wisdom |
Not to sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine.
To brood over our sorrow is to embitter our grief.
There is a vast difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration is a concession; liberty is a right; toleration is a matter of expediency; liberty is a matter of principle; toleration is a grant of man; liberty is a gift of God.
Melvin Tolson, fully Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
It required the Great Depression to open the eyes of the American people to the economic, cultural, social, political, and spiritual values inherent in a great democracy. For this I am thankful. As a distinctly finite being, man learns only through tragic experiences. Progress and Pain are Siamese twins.
Democracy | Depression | Man | Pain | People | Progress | Wisdom |
We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.
Joe D. Batten and Leonard C. Hudson
The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person is the difference between get and give. The unhappy person is concerned with: the world is against me, what’s in it for me, what are people doing to me, and so forth. When your central theme in life is getting you usually do get headaches. But the happy person is looking toward what he can do, what he can give, what he can accomplish.
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
The most important thing in life is not simply to capitalize on your gains. Any fool can do that. The most important thing is to profit from your losses. That requires intelligence and it marks the difference between a man of sense and a fool.
Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo
After rain comes sunshine; after darkness comes the glorious dawn. There is no sorrow without its alloy of joy, there is no joy without its admixture of sorrow. Behind the ugly terrible mask of misfortune lies the beautiful soothing countenance of prosperity. So, tear the mask!
Darkness | Dawn | Joy | Misfortune | Prosperity | Sorrow | Ugly | Misfortune |
There is an absolute truth about everything; it lies behind all blunders and all partial knowledges, a calm, sure, unfound certainty, like the great sea beneath its waves, like the great sky behind its clouds. God knows it. It and the possession of it makes the eternal difference between God’s knowledge and man’s. It is a beautiful and noble faith when a man thus believes in the absolute truth, unfound, unfindable perhaps by man, and yet surely existent behind and at the heart of everything.
Absolute | Eternal | Faith | God | Heart | Knowledge | Man | Truth | God |
Luis Buñuel, fully Luis Buñuel Portolés
In any society, the artist has a responsibility. Their effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important.
Change | Important | Responsibility | Society | World |