This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hope and fear are inseparable; there is no fear without hope, no hope without fear.
If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear and hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be so much resolute and firm as perverse and obstinate.
Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
A great Hope fell. You heard no noise. The Ruin was within.
The most universal thing is hope, for hope stays with those who have nothing else.
It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.
A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others; for men's minds will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope to attain to another's virtue, will seek to come at even hand by depressing another's fortune.
Evil | Fortune | Good | Hope | Man | Men | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
Faith has to do with the basis, the ground on which we stand. Hope is reaching out for something to come. Love is just being there and acting.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Better | Children | Hope | Man | Possessions |
As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
Conduct | Government | Hope | Justice | Mankind | Nations | Will |
The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself.
Action | Contrast | Eternity | Existence | Future | History | Hope | Imagination | Mind | Past | Time | Universe | Will |
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
Beauty | Better | Contemplation | Faith | Hope | Imagination | Love | Nature | Science | Taste | Beauty | Contemplation | Understand |
Sentimental time is a genuine, if poetical, version of the march of existence, even as pictorial space is a genuine, if poetical version of its distribution... the least sentimental term in sentimental time is the term now, because it marks the junction of fancy with action... For it is evident that actual succession can contain nothing but nows, so that now in a certain way is immortal. But this immortality is only a continual reiteration, a series of moments each without self-possession and without assurance of any other moment; so that if ever the now loses its indicative practical force and becomes introspective, it becomes acutely sentimental, a perpetual hope unrealized and a perpetual dying.
Action | Existence | Force | Hope | Immortality | Nothing | Self | Space | Time |