This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it.
Character | Culture | Malice | Temptation | Temptation |
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.
Frederick Loomis, fully Sir Frederick Oscar Warren Loomis
Moaning over what cannot be helped is a confession of futility and fear, of emotional stagnation - in fact, of selfishness and cowardice. The best way to "snap out of it" is to stop thinking about yourself, and start thinking about other people. You can lighten your own load by doing something for someone else. By the simple device of doing an outward, unselfish act today, you can make the past recede. The present and future will again take on their true challenge and perspective.
Challenge | Character | Cowardice | Fear | Future | Past | People | Present | Selfishness | Thinking | Will | Wisdom |
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 |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
Absolution | Psychoanalysis | Wisdom |
Gossip is always a personal confession of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbor made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.
Research teaches a man to admit he is wrong and to be proud of the fact that he does so, rather than try with all his energy to defend an unsound plan because he is afraid that admission of error is a confession of weakness when rather it is a sign of strength.
Energy | Error | Man | Plan | Research | Strength | Weakness | Wisdom | Wrong | Afraid |
Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL
Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.
Chance | Confidence | Despair | Hope | Mercy | Pardon | Sin |
José Martí, fully José Julián Martí Pérez
A poem is something sacred. Let no one take it for anything except itself.
Faith is verification by the heart; confession by the tongue; action by the limbs.