This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
On that day God will not judge us about psalmody, nor for the neglect of prayer, but because by abandoning them, we have opened our door to the demons.
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
Conversation | Quiet |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
I think I understand how it can make you. We tried to build our love beyond the moment, but only moments are sure. For the rest we need faith, and faith, is it courage or laziness?
Contemplation | Effort | Experience | Quiet | Contemplation | Think |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
We often err by contemplating an individual solely in his relation and behaviour to us, and generalizing from that with more rapidity than wisdom. We might as well argue that the moon has no rotation about her axis, because the same hemisphere is always presented to our view.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I did not know the woman soul, that crowning gift of Providence to man, which, if we do not ourselves degrade it, will set an edge to all that is good in us. I did not know how the love of a woman will tinge a man's whole life and every action with unselfishness. I did not know how easy it is to be noble when someone else takes it for granted that one will be so; or how wide and interesting life becomes when viewed by four eyes instead of two.
Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. “A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it.”
We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.
Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party.
Kill | Quiet | Understand |
It is our duty to look to God's commands, and not to His decrees; to our own duty, and not to His purposes. The decrees of God are a vast ocean, into which many possibly have curiously pried to their own horror and despair; but few or none have ever pried into them to their own profit and satisfaction.
God has formed us moral agents... that we may promote the happiness of those with whom He has placed us in society, by acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights, bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.
Death | Liberty | Pardon | People | Public | Quiet | Right | Spirit | Time | Will | Wrong |