This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
Religion is a hunger for beauty and love and glory. It is wonder and the mystery and majesty, passion and ecstasy. It is emotion as well as mind, feeling as well as knowing, the subjective as well as the objective. It is the heart soaring to heights the head alone will never know; the apprehension of meanings science alone will never find; the awareness of values ethics alone will never reveal. It is the human spirit yearning for, and finding, something infinitely greater than itself which it calls God.
Awareness | Beauty | Ecstasy | Ethics | Glory | God | Heart | Hunger | Knowing | Love | Mind | Mystery | Passion | Religion | Science | Spirit | Will | Wisdom | Wonder | Beauty | Awareness |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time.
Acceptance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Desire | Existence | Faith | God | Health | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Beauty | God | Poem | Thought | Understand |
There is, they say, (and I believe there is), a spark within us of th’ immortal fire, that animates and moulds the grosser frame; and when the body sinks, escapes to heaven; its native seat, and mixes with the gods.
Every civilization rests on a set of promises... If the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.
Civilization | Faith | Hope | Wisdom |
Too many follow example rather than precept; but it is safer to learn rather from precept than example. Man a wise teacher does not follow his own teaching; for it is easier to say, do this, than to do it. If then I see good doctrine with an evil life, though I pity the last, I will follow the first. Good sayings belong to all; evil actions only to their authors.
Character | Doctrine | Evil | Example | Good | Life | Life | Man | Pity | Precept | Will | Wise | Learn | Teacher |
Death fills me with its abundance. What is this flood, overcoming body and sense? I feel the walls of my skull crack, the barriers part, the sun-flood enter - Love, lore, not lost, only magnified, floating eternal seas of essence - before and behind births and deaths, spiritual gravitation, the emergence ever-more expanding... O my questioner! you do not suspect me - you suspect yourself: to-morrow, seeing yourself, you will see me, and the illumined spirit, passing the portal, God-grown, will hail me proudly.
Abundance | Body | Character | Death | Eternal | God | Love | Sense | Spirit | Will |
Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.
Body | Character | Experience | Men | Self |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer, this head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
Hermalaus Barbarus, also Ermalao or Hermalao Barbaro
Fortunately wise is he who gains wisdom from another's mishap.
A brilliant mind without faith is like a beautiful face without eyes.
I have always been subconsciously embarrassed by the “function” of Christmas and New Years - the spirit of “loving kindness,” that is presumed to come to a head like a boil once a year, when it has been magnificently concealed up to that moment!