This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for, (including) the want of sufficient restraint upon their passions.
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection , which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.
Absolute | Character | Consciousness | Imagination | Life | Life | Marriage | Reality | Struggle | Woman |
There is radicalism in all getting, and conservatism in all keeping. Lovemaking is radical, while marriage is conservative.
Conservatism | Marriage | Radicalism |
The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep peace and healing.
Circumstances | Knowing | Mind | Patience | Peace | Reality | Wants | Will |
The open mind never acts - when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still, when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our own conclusion. The man who wants to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate.
My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worse. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.
Character | Heart | Man | Mind | Nothing | Retirement | Solitude | Tenderness | Wants |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination.
Birth | Imagination | Marriage | Men | Nature | Soul | Intellect |
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 |
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.
Wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much but wants more.
Anti-Semitism, in a word, is fear of man's fate. The anti-Semite is the man who wants to be a pitiless stone, a furious torrent, devastating lightning: in short, anything but a man.
Anti-semitism | Fate | Fear | Man | Wants |