This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the quest sees now how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had believed to be true since my earliest youth. And since that time, I have been convinced that I must once and for all seriously try to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted and begin to build anew, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure for my beliefs.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
The wonder is here, not there; now, not to be, now always.
Wonder |
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
When I consider that I dwell this moment in the eternal Now that has ever been and will be, that I am in the midst of immortal things this moment, that there probably are souls as infinitely superior to mine as mine to a piece of timber – what, then, is a “miracle.”?
The soul that flows out into God does not die; death is alien to what is submerged in life. The soul is alive, but not to itself. Stars are ever giving light, but they do not shine in the daytime; the sun shines in them, and they are hidden away in the sun’s rays. So it is with the soul; still alive, but now its life is bound up with God; or rather, it is God who lives in it.
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
The greatest superstition now entertained by public men is that hypocrisy is the royal road to success.
Hypocrisy | Men | Public | Success | Superstition |
Isaac Newton, fully Sir Isaac Newton
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoothe pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. Think now she gives when our attention is distracted and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late what’s not believed in, or if still believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
Attention | Courage | Cunning | Fear | Forgiveness | Giving | History | Knowledge | Memory | Tears | Thought | Think | Thought |
Susan B. Anthony, fully Susan Brownell Anthony
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons?
Question |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. We started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown remembered gate where the earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree. Not known, because not looked for. But heart, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall beware and all manner of things shall beware when the tongues of flames are enfolded into the crown not of fire, and the fire and the rose are one.
Beginning | Children | Earth | Heart | Simplicity | Time | Will |
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Balance | Civilization | Existence | Government | History | Life | Life | Race | Truth | World |
The older I grow - and I now stand on the brink of eternity - the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes: "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever."
The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal; work it out there from, and, working, believe, lie be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself.
Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
Children |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The satisfaction with your work, even at its best, will never be complete, since nothing on earth can be perfect. The forward pace of the world which you are pushing will be painfully slow. But what of that: the difference between a hundred and a thousand years is less than you now think. But doing what must be done – that is eternal, even when it walks with poverty.