This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
True remorse depends, to my mind, on a man's accurate knowledge of his own motives.
Contradiction | Time | Woman |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that that blindness cannot see.
Age | Contradiction | Life | Life | Model | Reflection | Time |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
Providence certainly does not favor just certain individuals, but the deep wisdom of its counsel, instruction and ennoblement extends to all.
Devotion | Individual | Prayer | Words |
You may now ask how it can be true that this image of God, which is man’s soul, can be restored to His likeness here in this life; it would seem to be impossible. You must admit you are very far from such a position. If it were restored we would possess sound understanding, clear vision, and pure ardent Love of God and Spiritual things all of the time. Your thoughts, your reason and affections of the soul are so immersed in Earthly things that your have little perception of Spiritual things.
Better | Contemplation | Devotion | Experience | God | Grace | Guidance | Knowledge | Love | Order | Soul | Surrender | Will | Guidance | God | Contemplation |
The purpose of preaching and of worship is transformation.
Contradiction | Words | Work |
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
Attention | Devotion | Force | Inactivity |
It is an insistence that the love of God happens in praxis, not in thought or in piety, and that “knowledge of God” is a relational reality, a point well recognized by John Calvin: “All right knowledge of God is born of obedience.”
Contradiction | Occupation | Question | World |
Its massive height near the City of Heaven joins a thousand mountains to the corner of the sea. Clouds, when I look back, close behind me, mists, when I enter them, are gone. A central peak divides the wilds and weather into many valleys... Needing a place to spend the night, I call to a wood-cutter over the river.
Day | Devotion | Doubt | Gold | Happy | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wise |
There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature to have his strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. He who plants a tree looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. Nothing could be less selfish than this.
Better | Devotion | Excellence | Joy | Self | Sense | Sentiment | World | Excellence |
Mahomet now proceeded to execute the great object of his religious aspirations, the purifying of the sacred edifice from the symbols of idolatry, with which it was crowded. All the idols in and about it, to the number of three hundred and sixty, were thrown down and destroyed. Among these, the most renowned was Hobal, an idol brought from Balka, in Syria, and fabled to have the power of granting rain. It was, of course, a great object of worship among the inhabitants of the thirsty desert. There were statues of Abraham and Ishmael also, represented with divining arrows in their hands ; an outrage on their memories, said Mahomet, being symbols of a diabolical art which they had never practiced. In reverence of their memories, therefore, these statues were demolished. There were paintings, also, depicting angels in the guise of beautiful women. The angels, said Mahomet, indignantly, are no such beings. There are celestial hour is provided in paradise for the solace of true believers ; but angels are ministering spirits of the Most High, and of too pure a nature to admit of sex. The paintings were accordingly obliterated. Even a dove, curiously carved of wood, he broke with his own hands, and cast upon the ground, as savoring of idolatry.
Better | Chastity | Day | Devotion | Giving | God | Gratitude | Life | Life | Tenderness | Wife | God |
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which the food comes.
Contradiction | Good | Harmony | Justification | Nothing | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
Contradiction | Health | Individual |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Chance | Civilization | Culture | Devotion | Humanity | Ignorance | Men | Will | World |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.
Attention | Contradiction | Dignity | Discovery | Habit | Innovation | Knowledge | Lord | Man | Mind | Reputation | Science | Society | Study | System | Terror | Theology | Thought | Time | Society | Discovery | Thought |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain.
Ability | Correctness | Devotion | Discipline | Self-sacrifice | Leadership |