This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As it is the nature of the body to be developed by appropriate exercises, it is the nature of the soul to be developed by moral precepts.
Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle.
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
To the mother alone it has been given, that her soul during the nine months should touch the soul of the child, and impose upon it predispositions to truth, gentleness, goodness, the culture of which precious germs she should complete in the light of day, after having sown them in the mysterious mysteries of her maternity.
Culture | Day | Gentleness | Light | Mother | Soul | Truth |
The soul of man (whose life or motion is perpetual contemplation or thought) is the mistress of two potent rivals, the one reason, the other passion, that are in the continual suit.
Contemplation | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Reason | Soul | Thought | Contemplation |
Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.
Both inner and outer hearing, which cannot be separated, change consciousness to a greater extent than anything else in our eye-orientated age.
Age | Change | Consciousness |
[Paraphrase] Beauty for the soul are things displaying themselves in their individuality.
Beauty | Individuality | Soul | Beauty |
Go into your life and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
We see that music does not merely take place within time. It also exalts and surmounts time. It is not just that the past and present merge. The future is also involved to the extent that within the harmonious progression of music the note sounding 'now' anticipates the future note in which it will be resolved The not to come is, as it were, contained in the present note, which could not otherwise 'summon' it. Anyone musical knows that it is hardly possible to break off certain cadences before the final note. The final note is 'there' whether it is played or not. It may sound out later - or not at all - but, viewed in a higher sense, it was to be heard much earlier. Time only completes what became necessary outside of time. It merely makes manifest what would otherwise have remained hidden.
Future | Music | Past | Present | Sense | Sound | Time | Will |
Do not run after happiness, but seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you. The day will dawn full of expectation, the night will fall full of repose. This world will seem a very good place, and the world to come a better place still.
Better | Dawn | Day | Expectation | Good | Repose | Will | World | Happiness |
Conscience in the soul is the root of all true courage. If a man would be brave, let him learn to obey his conscience.
Conscience | Courage | Man | Soul | Learn |
Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity. It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial. Under the auspices of publicity, the cause in the court of law, and the appeal to the court of public opinion, are going on at the same time... It is through publicity alone that justice becomes the mother of security.
Cause | Justice | Law | Mother | Opinion | Public | Security | Soul | Time |
Transparent Man, who is seen and seen through, foolish, who has nothing left to hide, who has become transparent through self-acceptance; his soul is loved, wholly revealed, wholly existential; he is just what he is, freed from paranoid concealment, from the knowledge of his secrets and his secret knowledge; his transparency serves as a prism for the world and the not-world. For it is impossible reflectively to know thyself; only the last reflection of an obituary may tell the truth, and only God knows our real names.
Acceptance | Concealment | God | Know thyself | Knowledge | Man | Nothing | Reflection | Self | Soul | Truth | World | God |