This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You say you are not happy in the Mission. That, in itself, is not a sign that God does not want you there. Perfect contentment is never to be found, in whatever place and condition one may be. This life is full of annoyances and troubles both of mind and of body; it is a state of continual agitation, which snatches peace of mind from those who think they possess it and eludes those who seek it. Did Our Lord lead an easy life?
Books | Custom | Reason | Writing | Understand |
Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
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Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Culture | Custom | Discovery | Education | Enough | Freedom | Individual | People | Philosophy | Respect | Riches | Spirit | Unique | Woman | World | Riches | Respect | Discovery |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen. It was the wild dream of an opium smoker, a vision of delirium. The head was like that of a fowl, the body that of a bloated lizard, the trailing tail was furnished with upward-turned spikes, and the curved back was edged with a high serrated fringe, which looked like a dozen cocks' wattles placed behind each other. In front of this creature was an absurd manikin, or dwarf, in human form, who stood staring at it.
Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
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Prize and study the Scripture. We can have no delight in meditation on him unless we know him; and we cannot know him but by the means of his own revelation; when the revelation is despised, the revealer will be of little esteem. Men do not throw off God from being their rule, till they throw off Scripture from being their guide; and God must need be cast off from being an end, when the Scripture is rejected from being a rule. Those that do not care to know his will, that love to be ignorant of his nature, can never be affected to his honor. Let therefore the subtleties of reason vail to the doctrine of faith, and the humor of the will to the command of the word.
Custom | Heart | Meaning | Money | Thought | Worship | Thought |
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
It is a difficult matter to gain the affection of a cat. He is a philosophical, methodical animal, tenacious of his own habits, fond of order and neatness, and disinclined to extravagant sentiment. He will be your friend, if he finds you worthy of friendship, but not your slave.
Custom | Enjoyment | God | Good | Life | Life | Love | Reading | Rest | Reward | Sense | Soul | Thought | God | Privilege | Thought |
Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
Battle | Custom | Effort | Philosophy |
The imaginations of them that sleep are those we call ‘dreams.’ And these also, as also all other imaginations, have been before, either totally or by parcels, in the sense. And, because in sense, the brain and nerves, which are the necessary organs of sense, are so benumbed in sleep as not easily to be moved by the action of external objects, there can happen in sleep no imagination, and therefore no dream, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of man’s body; which inward parts, for the connection they have with the brain and other organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; whereby the imaginations there formerly made, appear as if a man were waking; saving that the organs of sense being now benumbed, so as there is no new object which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a dream must needs be more clear in this silence of sense than our waking thoughts. And hence it cometh to pass that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible, to distinguish exactly between sense and dreaming. For my part, when I consider that in dreams I do not often nor constantly think of the same persons, places, objects, and actions, that I do waking, nor remember so long a train of coherent thoughts, dreaming, as at other times, and because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied, that, being awake, I know I dream not, though when I dream I think myself awake.
Custom | Imagination | Man | Understanding | Will | Words | Understand |
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.
The machine can free man or enslave him; it can make of this world something resembling a paradise or a purgatory. Men have it within their power to achieve a security hitherto dreamed of only by the philosophers, or they may go the way of the dinosaurs, actually disappearing from the earth because they fail to develop the social and political intelligence to adjust to the world which their mechanical intelligence has created.
The solemn fog; significant and budge; a fool with judges, amongst fools a judge.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as the indubitable starting point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to a test of observation or experiment.
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Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean but I shall be good health to you nonetheless and filter and fibre your blood.
Argument | Custom | God | Knowledge | Little | Men | Mind | Music | Peace | Promise | Spirit | God |
All achievement should be measured in human happiness.
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
Against the groaning mast I stand, the Atlantic surges swell, to bear me from my native land and Zo?'s wild farewell. From billow upon billow hurl'd I can yet hear her say, `And is there nothing in the world worth one short hour's delay?' `Alas, my Zo?! were it thus, I should not sail alone, nor seas nor fates had parted us, but are you all my own?' Thus were it, never would burst forth my sighs, Heaven knows how true! But, though to me of little worth, the world is much to you. `Yes,' you shall say, when once the dream (So hard to break!) is o'er, `My love was very dear to him, my fame and peace were more.'
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If... I can by any lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sorrow; if I can now and then penetrate through the gathering film of misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow beings and himself, surely, surely, I shall not then have written entirely in vain.
It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow