This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Though the light and comfort of the outward world keeps even the worst men from any constant strong sensibility of that wrathful, fiery, dark and self-tormenting nature that is the very essence of every fallen unregenerate soul, yet every man in the world has more or less frequent and strong intimations given him that so it is with him in the inmost ground of his soul. How many inventions are some people forced to have recourse to in order to keep off a certain inward uneasiness, which they are afraid of and know not whence it comes? Alas, it is because there is a fallen spirit, a dark, aching fire, within them, which has never had its proper relief and is trying to discover itself and calling out for help at every cessation of worldly joy.
Devotion | Means | Piety | Spirit | Temper | Wisdom | World |
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate someone else’s type of thinking.
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
Belief | Courage | Eternal | Light | Means | Nature | Need | Trust | Wisdom | World |
Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit.
If you were to rise early every morning, as an instance of self-denial, as a method of renouncing indulgence, as a means of redeeming your time and of fitting your spirit for prayer, you would find mighty advantages from it. This method, though it seem such a small circumstance of life, would in all probability be a means [toward] great piety. It would keep it constantly in your head that softness and idleness were to be avoided and that self-denial... It would teach you to exercise power over yourself, and make you able by degrees to renounce other pleasures and tempers that war against the soul.
Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
So on he went, and on the way he thought of all the glorious things of yesterday, nought of the price whereat they must be bought, but ever to himself did softly say "no roaming now, my wars are passed away, no long dull days devoid of happiness, when such a love my yearning heart shall bless."
Art | Civilization | Competition | Life | Life | Means | System | Will | Art |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.
There are very few women in society whose virtue outlasts their beauty.
Means | Resolution |
We forget our faults easily when they are known to ourselves alone.
Means |
The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune.
It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated; and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.
Moderation in people who are contented comes from that calm that good fortune lends to their spirit.