This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The world? It is a territory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them their thorns and their bitterness… A place where hope, regarded as a passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable, where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui is always most the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one can expect in it.
Bitterness | Destiny | Ennui | Hope | Nothing | Passion | World | Think |
One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing.
Art | Beauty | Invention | Need | Novels | Reading | Television | Art | Beauty | Understand |
To live a day, to care for a single day, is to shape a life. Each day is an opportunity to choose where to place our care. What shall we do today? What simple acts of remembrance will we use to punctuate our time and enrich our walk upon the earth this single day?
Care | Day | Earth | Life | Life | Opportunity | Time | Will |
Boris Pasternak, fully Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
It’s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. It shows he isn’t a type. If her were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can’t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
Good | Immortality | Man | Means |
New York Times Editorial on the Holocaust NULL
It was and it is to do all that can be done to eradicate an evil thing out of our civilization… a thing so incredibly wicked that it would not have been believable of modern man if it had not actually occurred. This evil, this wickedness began with intolerance and hate in a few men’s hearts. It spread until it almost wrecked the world. Now the obligation is to remember, not in hate, not in the spirit of revenge, but so that this spirit cannot ever flourish again so long as man remains on earth. And to this end, let us begin, each of us, by looking into our own hearts.
Civilization | Earth | Evil | Hate | Intolerance | Man | Men | Obligation | Revenge | Spirit | Wickedness | World |
To put the temporal in the place of God, when done with full deliberation, is the sin of pride in all its gravity.
Deliberation | God | Pride | Sin |
Nahuatl Wise Men including Nezahualcoyotl NULL
Where are we going? We came only to be born. Our home is beyond: In the realm of the defleshed ones. 4 I suffer: Happiness, good fortune never comes my way. Have I come here to struggle in vain? This is not the place to accomplish things. Certainly nothing grows green here: Misfortune opens its blossoms.
Robert Edward Rubin, aka Eddy Rubin
The only place people find fulfillment is within themselves. And too often, that is the last place they look.
Fulfillment | People |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return.
Ability | Safe | Companionship | Child |
What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, my shadow pinned against a sweating wall, that place among the rocks--is it a cave, or winding path? The edge is what I have.
No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.
Time | Worth | Friendship |
Robert H. Schuller, fully Robert Harold Schuller
The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking.
Thinking |
Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
The primary indication… of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.
This world is by definition the place where God hides Himself. It contains His light, i.e., the knowledge of Him, in a hidden way. And the purpose of life is to discover God; or as the prophet says: “to fill the world with the knowledge of God.”
God | Knowledge | Life | Life | Light | Purpose | Purpose | World | God |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it.