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
Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. He never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.
It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.
Consequences | Defeat | Enemy | Will |
His [Jesus'] historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
Birth | Family | Men | Preference | Right |
For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other.
Birth | Family | Men | Preference | Right |
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike. The men who returned from the third attempt to climb Mount Everest, made in the summer of 1924, have told us that from now on the character of the endeavor is clearly defined in advance. One of them has recently said that the higher altitudes, from 22,000 to 28,000 feet, reached by the last party, were attained not by sportsmen and scientists breaking the mountain to their intention, but by men who had come to feel towards the mountain an almost mystical relationship. He said that the mountain itself, with its tremendous appeal, must take men to the top, and that only a spirit, which for the want of any other accurate word must be called religion, would ever carry men the last exacting two thousand feet. What he seems to mean is that, in the presence of that imperious and majestic reality, the cheap coercive attempt to conquer the world must always break down, and that only something like the spirit of worship can draw and lift men at the last. The climbing of Mount Everest has ceased to be purely a geographical, political, and physiological problem. It has passed, as every great human endeavor must finally pass, into the realm of religion. And only the man whose peace is found in the imperious will of that terrific reality will ever stand upon its summit. After he had dragged the blankets out of the empty tent at Camp VI, high up on the shoulder of Everest, and had laid them in a “T” on the snow to tell the watchers below that there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine, Odell closed the flap of the tent and began the third retreat to India. “I glanced up,” he says, “at the mighty summit above me, which ever and anon deigned to reveal its cloud-wreathed features. It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and to howl derision in wind gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—the mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess, or much more to sling at her our blasphemous challenges. If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomo Lungma—the Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows—had we violated it, was I now violating it? Had we approached her with due reverence and singleness of heart and purpose?” That, in modern parable, is the crux of the temptation in the wilderness. Magic in us dies and religion is born with that question which, if rightly answered, prefaces the true reference of the soul to God. What right have I to make trial of my God? Have I violated his holy being with my self-will? Have I approached him with due reverence and singleness of mind and heart?
Bible | Commerce | Defeat | Disillusionment | Eternal | God | Health | Heart | Idleness | Lord | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Religion | Right | Spirit | Story | Struggle | Temper | Temptation | Universe | Will | World | Commerce | God | Bible | Old | Temptation |
Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.
Angels | Comfort | Darkness | Day | Death | Eternal | Family | Grave | Heaven | Joy | Light | Little | Mother | Nature | Silence | Sin | Sorrow | Soul | Sound | Space | Spirit | Tears | Thinking | Woman | World | Youth | Youth |
The Holiness of Minute Particulars - And many conversèd on these things as they labour’d at the furrow, Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery; It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.… He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!
Family | Good | Harmony | Land | Lord | Love | Man | Vengeance | Forgive |
Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?" He replied, "All poets believe it does. And in ages of imagination, this firm persuasion removes mountains; but many are not capable of firm persuasion of anything.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me, I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
Gentlemen of the jury, let me ask you what has been the state and condition of this unhappy and distracted country? I have mentioned two opposing creeds, and consequently two opposing parties, and I have also mentioned persecution; but let me also ask you again on which side has the persecution existed? Look at your Roman Catholic fellow-subjects, and ask yourselves to what terrible outburst of political and religious vengeance have they not been subjected? But it is said they are not faithful and loyal subjects, and that they detest the laws. Well, let us consider this - let us take a cursory view of all that the spirit and operation of the laws have left them to be thankful for - have brought to bear upon them for the purpose, we must suppose, of securing their attachment and their loyalty. Let us, gentlemen, calmly and solemnly, and in a Christian temper, take a brief glance at the adventures which the free and glorious spirit of the British Constitution has held out to them, in order to secure their allegiance. In the first place, their nobles and their gentry have been deprived of their property, and the right of tenure has been denied even to the people. Ah, my lord, and gentlemen of the jury, what ungrateful and disloyal miscreant could avoid loving a Constitution, and hugging to his grateful heart laws which showered down such blessings upon him, and upon all those who belong to a creed so favored? But it would seem to have been felt that these laws had still a stronger claim upon their affections. They would protect their religion as they did their property; and in order to attach them still more strongly, they shut up their places of worship - they proscribed and banished and hung their clergy - they hung or shot the unfortunate people who tied to worship God in the desert - in mountain fastnesses and in caves, and threw their dead bodies to find a tomb in the entrails of the birds of the air, or the dogs which even persecution had made mad with hunger. But again - for this pleasing panorama is not yet closed, the happy Catholics, who must have danced with delight, under the privileges of such a Constitution, were deprived of the right to occupy and possess all civil offices - their enterprise was crushed - their industry made subservient to the rapacity of their enemies, and not to their own prosperity. But this is far from being all. The sources of knowledge - of knowledge which only can enlighten and civilize the mind, prevent crime, and promote the progress of human society - these sources of knowledge, I say, were sealed against them; they were consequently left to ignorance, and its inseparable associate - vice. All those noble principles which result from education, and which lead youth into those moral footsteps in which they should tread, were made criminal in the Catholic to pursue, and impossible to attain; and having thus been reduced by ignorance to the perpetration of those crimes which it uniformly produces - the people were punished for that which oppressive laws had generated, and the ignorance which was forced upon them was turned into a penalty and a persecution. They were first made ignorant by one Act of Parliament, and then punished by another for those crimes which ignorance produces.
Death | Exaggeration | Present | Time |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
So much money is being spent on the campaigns that I doubt if either man, as good as they are, are worth what it will cost to elect them.
Family |