This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
Age |
In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson county looks terribly poor. The houses of our neighbors between here and Bardstown are pretty miserable. We [Trappists] are the ones who are supposed to be poor. Well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lives in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious looking, anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter…The world is terrible, people are falling to pieces and starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair, and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. And what, I’d like to ask them, have I given up anyway except headaches and responsibilities?
Contemplation is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Age | Church | Contemplation | Light | Means | Sin | Temptation | Contemplation | Temptation |
In an evolved society there are no innocent victims of propaganda.Propaganda succeeds because men want it to succeed. It works on minds because those minds want to be worked on. Its conclusions bring apparent light and satisfaction because that is the kind of satisfaction that people are longing for. It leads them to actions for which they are already half prepared: all they ask is that these actions be justified. If war propaganda succeeds it is because people want war, and only need a few good reasons to justify their own desire.
The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He has said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, and learn from my munificence to all to be kind to each other.
Mr. Washington knows that this was untrue; and knowing this, he had good reason to himself for refusing to furnish the House of Representatives with copies of the instructions given to Jay, as he might suspect, among other things, that he should also be called upon for copies of instructions given to other Ministers, and that, in the contradiction of instructions, his want of integrity would be detected. Mr. Washington may now, perhaps, learn when it is too late to be of any use to him, that a man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected.
The sense of liberation from illusory difference
Age | Cult | Error | Human race | Pleasure | Race | Selfishness |
The babbling sounds that mimic echo plays, The fairy shade, and its eternal maze? Nature and Art in all their charms combin'd, And all Elysium to one view confin'd!
Age | Beauty | Books | Children | Cost | Credit | Day | Disdain | Example | Glory | Grace | Heaven | Hope | Kill | Little | Love | Marriage | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Thought | Time | Truth | Wants | Waste | Wisdom | Beauty | Old | Thought |
When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. ‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies.’ ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.’ ‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leapèd and shoutèd and laugh’d And all the hills echoèd.
Age | Doubt | Envy | Eternity | God | Gold | Good | Grave | Grief | Heaven | Hell | Innocence | Joy | Judgment | Knowledge | Light | Little | Passion | Philosophy | Public | Revenge | Right | Soul | Teach | Truth | Woe | Woman | Words | World | Worth | God | Child | Old |
W. T. Stace, fully Walter Terence Stace
The essential character of Neo-Platonism comes out in its theory of the mystical exaltation of the subject to God. It is the extremity of subjectivism, the forcing of the individual subject to the centre of the universe, to the position of the Absolute Being. And it follows naturally upon the heels of Scepticism. In the Sceptics all faith in the power of thought and reason had finally died out. They {377} took as their watchword the utter impotence of reason to reach the truth. From this it was but a step to the position that, if we cannot attain truth by the natural means of thought, we will do so by a miracle. If ordinary consciousness will not suffice, we will pass beyond ordinary consciousness altogether. Neo-Platonism is founded upon despair, the despair of reason. It is the last frantic struggle of the Greek spirit to reach, by desperate means, by force, the point which it felt it had failed to reach by reason. It seeks to take the Absolute by storm. It feels that where sobriety has failed, the violence of spiritual intoxication may succeed. It was natural that philosophy should end here. For philosophy is founded upon reason. It is the effort to comprehend, to understand, to grasp the reality of things intellectually. Therefore it cannot admit anything higher than reason. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought--this is death to philosophy. Philosophy in making such an admission, lets out its own life-blood, which is thought. In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion. Christianity triumphs, and sweeps away all independent thought from its path. There is no more philosophy now till a new spirit of enquiry and wonder is breathed into man at the Renaissance and the Reformation. Then the new era begins, and gives birth to a new philosophic impulse, under the influence of which we are still living. But to reach that new era of philosophy, the human spirit had first to pass through the arid wastes of Scholasticism.
Age | Aims | Control | Effort | Faith | God | Inquiry | Invention | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | People | Pleasure | Principles | Purpose | Purpose | Revolution | Science | Spirit | Time | Universe | Vision | World | God |
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
Ballade of Dead Actors - Where are the passions they essayed, And where the tears they made to flow? Where the wild humours they portrayed For laughing worlds to see and know? Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe? Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall? And Millamant and Romeo? Into the night go one and all. Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the armours -- friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade, The mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show? The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow? Into the night go one and all. The curtain falls, the play is played: The Beggar packs beside the Beau; The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid; The Thunder huddles with the Snow. Where are the revellers high and low? The clashing swords? The lover's call? The dancers gleaming row on row? Into the night go one and all.
Age | Chance | Duty | Fear | Gold | Need | Politics | Time | War | Wit |
We were really ripping off the customers,but we couldn't help it. I thought it was unconscionable that people were accumulating such quantities of silver in complete disregard of other people's welfare,I mean, photographic film was so expensive that a doctor called me to say he had to charge patients so much for X-rays he simply wasn't taking all that he should.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience. Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. ‘No daring is fatal,’ said René Crevel, a phrase which I shall never forget. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring, i.e., in creating from the flimsiest, slenderest support. In the beginning this daring is mistaken for will, but with time the will drops away and the automatic process takes its place, which again has to be broken or dropped and a new certitude established which has nothing to do with knowledge, skill, technique or faith. By daring one arrives at this mysterious X position of the artist, and it is this anchorage which no one can describe in words but yet subsists and exudes from every line that is written.
Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade, Apt emblem of a virtuous maid Silent and chaste she steals along, Far from the world's gay busy throng: With gentle yet prevailing force, Intent upon her destined course; Graceful and useful all she does, Blessing and blest where'er she goes; Pure-bosom'd as that watery glass, And Heaven reflected in her face.
Age | Better | God | Grief | Happy | Joy | Longing | Love | Men | Peace | Providence | Receive | Sacred | Story | Troubles | Weakness | God | Child |