This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference.
Action | Attention | Choice | Earth | Harmony | Peace | Thought | Time | Will | Wisdom | World | Thought |
Temple Bailey, born Irene Temple Bailey
The mother said, “This is a better day than the last, for my children have learned fortitude in the face of hardness. Yesterday I gave them courage. Today I have given them strength... This is the best day of all, for I have shown my children God... I have reached the end of my journey. And now I know that the end is better than the beginning, for my children can walk alone, and their children after them.” And the children said, “You will always walk with us, Mother, even when you have gone through the gates.”
Beginning | Better | Children | Courage | Day | Fortitude | God | Journey | Mother | Strength | Will |
Peter A. Bertocci, fully Peter Anthony Bertocci
The sexual act takes on qualitative significance and value which transcends the other meanings the sexual act can have, when lovers use the act purposely to become parents. For now the two lovers express their faith in love itself, in the possibilities open to their children within the social order and in this world.
Peter Abelard, Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; French: Pierre Abélard
In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention. Whence when the same thing is done by the same man at different times, by the diversity of his intention, however, his action is now said to be good, now bad.
Action | Diversity | Good | Inquiry | Intention | Man | Right | Truth | Wisdom |
Alice Allen, fully Alice Olive Allen Brant
Is Heaven not, after all, the Now and Here, the common things of life are all so dear.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn.
Appearance | Birth | Body | Force | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Object | Space | Time | Wisdom | World |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges.
Bitterness | Change | Daring | Future | Man | Surrender | Will | World | Loss | Privilege |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Whether or not you decide to emulate that which you have come to understand through empathetic identification, you will never be quite the same again. In learning to think and to feel, to understand and to value more like another you will have grown in your own self-understanding and in your capacity to speak and interact with others. You, and that which you are now able to embrace, may well find in one another nurture, respect, protection, and enrichment. It is in such qualities of living that true meaning will be encountered, however tentative and fluctuating that meaning may be. It is in the very midst of the flux of the meaningful that its perpetuation and its renewal is to be found.
Capacity | Learning | Meaning | Qualities | Respect | Self | Understanding | Will | Think | Understand | Value |
The way that we attune to our possible outcomes is through our viewpoint of life. From this perspective, every life-threatening condition of each body is already healed, peace is already present, and every child, woman, and man of our world is already fed. Now we are invited to choose the quality of thought, feeling, and emotion that allows us to “bend” the waves of time and bring these conditions into the focus of the present.
Body | Focus | Life | Life | Man | Peace | Present | Thought | Time | Woman | World |
Your subconscious mind produces in your daily life evidence of the thoughts you send back to it. The constant repetition of fear, anxiety and worry thoughts will bring upon you the same thing multiplied many times over, but the constant practice of positive thinking, making affirmations hour by hour that God is now healing your fears and worries, will bring magnificent results... You have the ability for successful living. You have the tools. The power you use is faith and the tools are your thoughts and ideas.
Ability | Anxiety | Anxiety | Evidence | Faith | Fear | God | Ideas | Life | Life | Mind | Power | Practice | Thinking | Will | Worry | God |
Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
Whether on the floor of Congress or in the boardrooms of corporate America or in the corridors of a big city hospital, there is no body of professional expertise and no anthology of case studies which can supplant the force of character which provides both a sense of direction and a means of fulfillment. It asks, now what you want to be, but who you want to be.
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Character | Life | Life | Music | Nature | Poetry | Rule | Loss |
Philosophy has the task and the opportunity of helping banish the concept that human destiny here and now is of slight importance in comparison with some supernatural destiny.
Destiny | Opportunity | Philosophy |
We now know that anything which is economically right is also morally right: there can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.