This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Some must watch while some must sleep, so runs the world away.
So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"For if I wait," said she, "Till time for roses be,-- for the moss-rose and the musk-rose, maiden-blush and royal-dusk rose,-- “What glory then for me in such a company?-- Roses plenty, roses plenty and one nightingale for twenty?"
I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?
Change | Experience | Failure | Order | People | Safe | Failure |
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing...
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.
Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire... the last "primitives" in Europe.
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.
Misfortune | Misfortune |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor — the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath — Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot — Heathcliff's still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.