This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.
Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.
Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Order | Self-sacrifice | Think |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One!
For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When our two souls stand up erect and strong, face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, until the lengthening wings break into fire at either curvèd point, — what bitter wrong can the earth do to us, that we should not long be here contented?
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, fully Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
They don't take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don't; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn't give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn.
Dreams | Imagination | Little | Rest | Will | World | Worth |
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
Rest |
There are lots of misconceptions about schizophrenia, [like that] patients are truly wild. In fact, of all the major mental illnesses, they're the least violent. People can't hold jobs, certainly not high-powered jobs...Can't have close friends and family. Can't live independently. A lot of those have some truth; they're true of a certain portion of people with schizophrenia. But it seems to me that a lot more than is now the case could be leading far more gratifying [lives]. When you tell someone, 'you're not going to be able to work,' or 'scale down your expectations,' then they do. And yet work gives most people so much of a sense of well-being, productivity. You're taking away from someone a thing that could be an important tool in their recovery by having these kind of negative expectations.
People |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Lest Love should value less what loss would value more, had it the stricken privilege --- it cherishes before.
Trees are massacred, houses go up - faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
She went of her own accord,' answered the master; 'she has a right to go if she please. Trouble me no more about her. Hereafter she is only me sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
But, thou art ever there, to bring the hovering vision back, and breathe new glories o'er the blighted spring, and call a lovelier Life from Death, and whisper, with a voice divine, of real worlds, as bright as thine.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.
Distress | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Past | Rest | Safe | Tears | Think |
Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.