This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A gracious man should be made up all of fire, overcoming and consuming all opposition, as fire does the stubble. All difficulties should be but whetstones to his fortitude.
Confidence | Conscience | Good |
Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
For a few brief days the orchards are white with blossoms. They soon turn to fruit, or else float away, useless and wasted, upon the idle breeze. So will it be with present feelings. They must be deepened into decision, or be entirely dissipated by delay.
Discipline | Spirit | Trials | Blessed |
That even among the most hackneyed and most hardened of malefactors there is still about them a softer part which will give way to the demonstrations of tenderness; that this one ingredient of a better character is still found to survive the dissipation of all the others, that, fallen as a brother may be from the moralities which at one time adorned him, the manifested good will of his fellow-man still carries a charm and an influence along with it; and that, therefore, there lies in this an operation which, as no poverty can vitiate, so no depravity can extinguish.
Chance | Conscience | Indulgence | Law | Mind | Object | Pleasure | Present | Will | Guilty |
By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse.
Conscience | Evil | Hurry | Man | Object | Obligation | Sense | Temptation | Turpitude | Will | Temptation |
With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!
Conscience | Man | Sound | Stupidity |
To the Arab Nation it was as a birth from darkness into light; Arabia first became alive by means of it. A poor shepherd people, roaming unnoticed in its deserts since the creation of the world: a Hero-Prophet was sent down to them with a word they could believe: see, the unnoticed becomes world-notable, the small has grown world-great; within one century afterwards, Arabia is at Grenada on this hand, at Delhi on that; — glancing in valor and splendor and the light of genius, Arabia shines through long ages over a great section of the world. Belief is great, life-giving. The history of a Nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great, so soon as it believes.
Conscience | Defeat |
A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe in his heart those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see what benefits can accrue by men's belief, to those that pretend, or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles or lies.
Conscience | Judgment |
Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope; the same without such opinion despair.
Conscience | Doctrine | Good | Judgment | Man | Presumption |
The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their connections; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.
Accident | Battle | Cause | Circumstances | Conscience | Fear | Life | Life | Man | Think |
For all laws are general judgments, or sentences of the legislator; as also every particular judgment is a law to him whose case is judged.
Conscience | Judgment |
Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.
Conscience | Day | Glory | Light | Looks | Tenderness |
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.
Conscience | Good | People | Tyranny |
The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings.
Authority | Coercion | Conscience | Error | Government | Rights | Government |
No race of kings has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations.
Conscience | Man | Rights |
That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.
Discipline | Government | People | Will | Government |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.
Conscience | Life | Life | Longing | Mind | Thought | Intellect | Thought |
I detest pornography. I utterly loathe writing that seeks to work on the passions and to exploit them, instead of releasing them in a healthy form : laughter … The utterly sick and subhuman reduction of ‘thought’ to nothingness: to something that appears to be sensual but is not even that.
Beginning | Conscience | Danger | Mind | Peace | People | Reason | Truth | Work | Absurdity | Danger |
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.
Contemplation | Day | Desolation | Devotion | Discipline | God | Joy | Justice | Labor | Magic | Obscurity | Obscurity | Peace | Relationship | Security | Spirit | Suffering | World | God | Contemplation | Happiness |