This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Vast tribes of savages, who had always been idolaters, who were perfectly incapable, from their low state of civilization, of forming any but anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, or of concentrating their attention steadily on any invisible object, and who for the most part were converted not by individual persuasion but by the commands of their chiefs, embraced Christianity in such multitudes that their habits of mind soon became the dominating habits of the Church. From this time the tendency to idolatry was irresistible. The old images were worshipped under new names, and one of the most prominent aspects of the Apostolical teaching was in practice ignored.
Age | Agony | Disease | Eternal | Happy | Heart | Pride | Purity | Remorse | Shame | Society | World | Society | Think |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The religion of one age is often the poetry of the next. Around every living and operative faith there lies a region of allegory and of imagination into which opinions frequently pass, and in which they long retain a transfigured and idealised existence after their natural life has died away. They are, as it were, deflected. They no longer tell directly and forcibly upon human actions. They no longer produce terror, inspire hopes, awake passions, or mould the characters of men; yet they still exercise a kind of reflex influence, and form part of the ornamental culture of the age. They are turned into allegories. They are interpreted in a non-natural sense. They are invested with a fanciful, poetic, but most attractive garb. They follow instead of controlling the current of thought, and being transformed by far-fetched and ingenious explanations, they become the embellishments of systems of belief that are wholly irreconcilable with their original tendencies. The gods of heathenism were thus translated from the sphere of religion to the sphere of poetry. The grotesque legends and the harsh doctrines of a superstitious faith are so explained away, that they appear graceful myths foreshadowing and illustrating the conceptions of a brighter day. For a time they flicker upon the horizon with a softly beautiful light that enchants the poet, and lends a charm to the new system with which they are made to blend; but at last this too fades away. Religious ideas die like the sun; their last rays, possessing little heat, are expended in creating beauty.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? — for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
Once it was, the repose of night, was a place, strong place, in which to sleep. It is shaken now. It will burst into flames, either now or tomorrow or the day after that.
The sky seemed so small that winter day, a dirty light on a lifeless world, contracted like a withered stick.
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The truth in a calm world, in which there is no other meaning, itself is calm, itself is summer and night, itself is the reader leaning late and reading there.
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The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself. The moonlight seemed to.
You were created of your name, the word is that of which you were the personage. There is no life except in the word of it.
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Poet, be seated at the piano. Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, its envious cachinnation.
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The importance of its hat to a form becomes more definite. The sweeping brim of the hat makes of the form most merciful Capitan, if the observer says so.
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