This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.
Ego | Mind | Perfection | Silence |
When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
O Life, how oft we throw it off and think, — 'Enough, enough of life in so much! — here's a cause for rupture; — herein we must break with Life, or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged, maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!' — And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes and think all ended. — Then, Life calls to us in some transformed, apocryphal, new voice, above us, or below us, or around. Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's, tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed to own our compensations than our griefs: still, Life's voice! — still, we make our peace with Life.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The critics say that epics have died out with Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods; I'll not believe it. I could never deem as Payne Knight did, that Homer's heroes measured twelve feet high. They were but men: -his Helen's hair turned grey like any plain Miss Smith's who wears a front; And Hector's infant whimpered at a plume as yours last Friday at a turkey-cock. All heroes are essential men, and all men possible heroes: every age, heroic in proportions, double faced, looks backward and before, expects a morn and claims an epos.
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
Dost thou think me so unlike myself and unmindful of my royal majesty that I would prefer my servant whom I myself have raised, before the greatest prince of Christendom...?
Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...
Bible | Despair | Enough | Fear | Punishment | Bible | Understand |
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 |
There is room in the halls of pleasure for a large and lordly train, but one by one we must all file on through the narrow isles of pain.
Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.
After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
Conversation | Invention | Silence |
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.
Pain | Punishment | Shame |
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free - free in a desert.
A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.
A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure. It will be a good thing for the Rougon family to be founded on a massacre, like many illustrious families.
God | Kindness | Punishment | God |
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. Espousing the former is not defending the latter.
Merit | Punishment |
The Revolution of 1848 found all the Rougons on the lookout, frustrated by their bad luck, and ready to use any means necessary to advance their cause. They were a family of bandits lying in wait, ready to plunder and steal.
Affront | Deeds | Indignation | Language | Men | Need | Nothing | People | Public | Punishment | Rank | Remorse | Thought | Traitor | Deeds | Thought |