This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
There is room in the halls of pleasure for a large and lordly train, but one by one we must all file on through the narrow isles of pain.
Each time you find yourself at a turning point, the best thing is to lie down and let hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.
After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk, Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?
Conversation | Invention | Silence |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man.
Abundance | Body | Conversation | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Meditation | Money | Need | People | Reading | Spirit | Time | World | Think | Understand |
A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself.
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
Obsession is irreducible to consciousness, even if it overwhelms it. In consciousness it is betrayed, but thematized by a said in which it is manifested. Obsession traverses consciousness counter-current-wise, is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium.
Silence |
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
Absence | Consciousness | Death | Evil | Means | Meditation | Men | Power |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who laboured every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine.
Darkness | Individuality | Light | Little | Silence | Space |
For the good, when praised, feel something of disgust, if to excess commended.