This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
Children | God | Heaven | Knowing | Men | Parents | Soul | Wants | Yearnings |
Love it is – not conscience – that is God’s regent in the human soul, because it can govern the soul as nothing else can.
The little I have seen of the world, teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends, I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came.
Anger | Fear | Heart | History | Hope | Joy | Little | Sorrow | Soul | World |
Every artists dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The human soul is a silent harp in God's quire, whose strings need only to be swept by the divine breath to chime in with the harmonies of creation.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action.
Action | Argument | Consciousness | Evidence | Force |
There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.
Soul |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
In its highest sense [the soul is] a vast capacity for God… A chamber with elastic and contractile walls, which can be expanded, with God as its guest, illimitably, but which without God shrinks until every vestige of the Divine is gone, and God’s image is kept without God’s spirit.
How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul! The intellect of man sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God in “the still, small voice,” and in a voice from the burning bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man!
Eternal | God | Heart | Man | Soul | Sound | God | Intellect |
Happy is the man who has that in his soul which acts upon the dejected as April airs upon violet roots. Gifts from the hand are silver and gold, but the heart gives that which neither silver nor gold can buy. To be full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of sympathy, full of helpful hope, causes a man to carry blessings of which he is himself as unconscious as a lamp is of its own shining. Such a one moves on human life as stars move on dark seas to bewildered mariners; as the sun wheels, bringing all the season with him from the south.
Blessings | Cheerfulness | Gold | Happy | Heart | Hope | Life | Life | Man | Soul | Sympathy |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Silence is the communion of a conscious soul with itself.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning, an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Morality | Observation | Religion |
Refinement is the lifting of one's self upwards from the merely sensual, the effort of the soul to etherealize the common wants and uses of life.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.
Consciousness | God | Man | Unconsciousness |