This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
No ship takes us to distant lands better than a book.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
One need not be a chamber to be haunted; one need not be a house; the brain has corridors surpassing material place.
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Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man's subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.
Desire | Individual | Integrity | Nothing | People | Plenty | War | Wisdom |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
This is my letter to the world, that never wrote to me,-- the simple news that Nature told, with tender majesty. Her message is committed to hands I cannot see; for love of her, sweet countrymen, judge tenderly of me!
The first thing that we have to realize is a fact of fundamental importance, because it means breaking away from all the ordinary prepossessions of orthodoxy. The plain fact is that Jesus taught no theology whatever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical. Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely concerned itself with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people to learn that all the doctrines and theologies of the churches are human inventions built up by their authors out of their own mentalities… There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible; it simply is not there.
Ability | Birth | Care | Consciousness | Debt | Determination | Discovery | Life | Life | Power | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Child |
Why not make the following experiment, which will not only be thrillingly interesting, but will certainly teach you more in one day than you could learn from books or lectures in many weeks. Here is what you have to do: For one whole day think, speak, and act exactly as you would if you were absolutely convinced of the truth of the statements that God has all power and infinite intelligence, and that His nature is infinite goodness and love. To think in this manner all day will be the most difficult thing, because it is so subtle. To speak in accordance with these truths will be easier, if you are vigilant. To act in accordance with them will be the easiest part, although it may require much in the way of moral courage.
Age | Belief | Enough | God | Power | Prayer | Reason | Space | Thinking | Time | Will | God |
Never recognize evil as having any reality. Never grant it the courtesy of the slightest or most formal acquiescence. Even though you may not be able to demonstrate over error for the time being, still you must not recognize it as having any power or reality. Every time you speak or think of evil as having any power-you give it that much power. Every time you allow it to scare you - you give it that much authority. Always fight error in thought - not in the sense of struggling with it, but fight it in the sense of knowing that it is only false belief. Do not let it rest quietly in thought; but harass it. An old soldier who was with Grant during most of the Civil War, once said; "The difference between Grant and McClellan was this-McClellan was a mighty fine soldier, knew all the military textbooks by heart and what you ought to do-but he wouldn't fight. When Lincoln would ask him to fight, he would say, 'Not ready yet' or 'We must be thoroughly prepared for a thing like that; next year maybe.' But Grant, he was always fighting. No matter how few men Grant had with him, if the enemy was anywhere near, Grant took a sock at him. Grant would always fight." The only attitude for the metaphysical student is; "I believe in Divine Harmony and nothing else. I do not believe there is any power in evil, and it is not going to get any recognition from me. The Truth about my problem is true now, not next week or next year but now, and the Truth concerning anything is all that there is of it." This is the scientific way of fighting and harassing error-to see that it has no chance to dig itself in. This is the General Grant touch. Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.
The Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world -whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself -is amenable to man's thought, and that he had dominion over it when he knows it.
Better | Bible | Faith | God | Mind | Success | Will | Wisdom | God | Bible | Think |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be hanging from a charm bracelet.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Memory deficiency got so bad with me, I forgot to repeat a piece of gossip I swore on my Grandmother's Grave never to divulge.
Patience is the ballast of the soul, that will keep it from rolling and tumbling in the greatest storms: and he, that will venture out without this to make him sail even and steady will certainly make shipwreck, and drown himself; first, in the cares and sorrows of this world; and, then, in perdition.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed.
A second way of crossing the line into clinical neurosis follows naturally from everything we have said. Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the "artiste-manque," as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an exÂternal, active, work project. The neurotic can't marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his inÂtroversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.17 In Rank's inspired conceptualization, the difference is put like this:
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Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people.