This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
These limbs,--whence had we them, this stormy force; this life-blood, with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow--a shadow system gathered round our me; wherein through some moments or years, the divine essence is to be revealed in the flesh.
Force |
The public! The public! How many fools does it require to make the public?
Existence | Man | Nothing | Popularity | Worth |
There is a set of people whom I cannot bear—the pinks of fashionable propriety,—whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behaviour, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them. We allow that their manners may be abundantly correct. There may be eloquence in every gesture, and gracefulness in every position; not a smile out of place, and not a step that would not bear the measurement of the severest scrutiny. This is all very fine: but what I want is the heart and gaiety of social intercourse; the frankness that spreads ease and animation around it; the eye that speaks affability to all, that chases timidity from every bosom, and tells every man in the company to be confident and happy. This is what I conceive to be the virtue of the text, and not the sickening formality of those who walk by rule, and would reduce the whole of human life to a wire-bound system of misery and constraint.
Achievement | Conquest | Deeds | Desire | Emotions | Force | Indulgence | Opposition | Power | Resolution | Virtue | Virtue | Worth | Deeds |
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.
Worth |
The chambers of the East are opened in every land, and the sun come forth to sow the earth with orient pearl. Night, the ancient mother, follows him with her diadem of stars. * * * Bright creatures! how they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven.
Force | Insight | Law | Nature | Perfection | Will | Circumstance | Intellect | Understand |
Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable.
Why any man should take the law of his country rather than his own Inspiration, for the rule of his action.
Force | Meaning | Principles |
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.
Force | Government | Law | Government |
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
Force | Government | History | Power | Government |
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
A forty years' experience of popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every step you take. If too hard pushed, they balk, and the machine retrogrades.
Desolation | Inheritance | Man | Object | Race | Right | Sentiment | Will | Worth |