This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but is use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to dance is not rendered ironical because the danced cannot last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transitoriness of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. what is truly sad is to have some impulse frustrated in the midst of its career, and robbed of its chosen object; and what is painful is to have an organ lacerated or destroyed when it is still vigorous, and not ready for its natural sleep and dissolution. We must not confuse the itch which our unsatisfied instincts continue to cause with the pleasure of satisfying and dismissing each of them in turn. Could they all be satisfied harmoniously we should be satisfied once for all and completely. Then doing and dying would coincide throughout and be a perfect pleasure.
Cause | Death | Enough | Illusion | Impulse | Life | Life | Nature | Object | People | Pleasure | Sound | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Better | Children | Hope | Man | Possessions |
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness…. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
Change | Children | Experience | Infancy | Instinct | Nothing | Past | Progress |
So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
Children | God | Heaven | Knowing | Men | Parents | Soul | Wants | Yearnings |
It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.
Children | Conduct | Consequences | Experience | Parents |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
We should treat our minds as innocent and ingenious children whose guardians we are - be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.
Many men do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do the flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing.
Children | Men | Principles |
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
Books | Children | Excitement | Family | Knowledge | Love | Man | Means | Mind | Reading | Right | Wrong | Learn |
When you have your own children you will understand your obligation to your parents.
Children | Obligation | Parents | Will | Understand |
Medical doctors strike me as ignorant as to how a healthy body works. They know how to control or repair some diseased bodies, but their medicine is often worse than the disease. And what about the pressure and competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry and the make-profits-quick motives of the food corporations? Medical doctors put little or no emphasis on nutrition, exercise and energy balance. They are paid when we are sick, not when we are well.
Balance | Body | Control | Disease | Energy | Industry | Little | Motives |
Jesse Jackson, fully Jesse Louis Jackson
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
People should be free to find or make for themselves the kind of educational experiences they want their children to have.