This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Some men come into holy obedience through the gateway of profound mystical experience. It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of one's being by His presence, to be, without warning, wholly uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to be blown by a tempest of unbelievable power which leaves one's old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one cries, "All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me" Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of ineffable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one.
Absolute | Children | Enough | Eternal | Father | God | Heaven | Life | Life | Men | Obedience | Power | Watchfulness | Will | God |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
There is an experience of the love of God which, when it comes upon us, and enfolds us, and bathes us, and warms us, is so utterly new that we can hardly identify it with the old phrase, God is love. Can this be the love of God, this burning, tender, wooing, wounding pain of love that pierces the marrow of my bones and burns out old loves and ambitions - God experienced is a vast surprise.
Age | Beginning | Children | God | Humility | Joy | Knowing | Life | Life | Love | Mercy | Naiveté | Obedience | Problems | Simplicity | Sorrow | Time | God |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do...
Absence | Better | Children | Global | Hate | Humanity | Kill | Knowledge | Men | Murder | News | Order | Peace | Religion | Self-realization | Terrorism | Thought | War | Murder | Thought |
Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby clothes, and after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the poorest home.
Children | Choice | Faith | Good | Important | Man | Need | Patience | Sentiment | Time | Happiness |
As yet, it must be owned, this daring expectation is but feebly reflected in our books. In looking over any collection of American poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America, Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion, Emerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions! There is no baptism of fire; no heat that breeds excess. Yet it is not life that is grown dull, surely; there are as many secrets in every heart, as many skeletons in every closet, as in any elder period of the world’s career. It is the interpreters of life who are found wanting, and that not on this soil alone, but throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not just to say, as someone has said, that our language has not in this generation produced a love-song, for it has produced Browning; but was it in England or in Italy that he learned to sound the depths of all human emotion?
Absence | Consciousness | Culture | Impulse | Man | Regret | Strength |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Another fruit of holy obedience is entrance into suffering. I would not magnify joy and rapture, although they are unspeakably great in the committed life. For joy and rapture need no advocates. But we shrink from suffering and can easily call all suffering an evil thing. Yet we live in an epoch of tragic sorrows, when man is adding to the crueler forces of nature such blasphemous horrors as drag soul as well as body into hell. And holy obedience must walk in this world, not aloof and preoccupied, but stained with sorrow's travail. Nor is the God-blinded soul given blissful oblivion but, rather, excruciatingly sensitive eyesight toward the world of men. The sources of suffering for the tendered soul are infinitely multiplied, well-nigh beyond all endurance. Ponder this paradox in religious experience: "Nothing matters; everything matters." I recently had an unforgettable hour with a Hindu monk. He knew the secret of this paradox which we discussed together: "Nothing matters; everything matters." It is a key of entrance into suffering. He who knows only one-half of the paradox can never enter that door of mystery and survive.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The whole purport of literature... is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Yes. Now you know. Now you know. That's what it was to be alive, to move about in a cloud of ignorance, to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those-- of those about you, to spend and waste time as if you had a million years, to be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion or another. Now you know, that's the 'happy' existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.
Children | Consequences | Equality | Men | Opportunity |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
Age | Agony | Beauty | Body | Children | Cost | Counsel | Diversity | Energy | Enough | Evil | Genius | Gold | Government | Helpfulness | Individual | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Model | Riches | Strength | Struggle | Sympathy | System | Will | World | Riches | Government | Counsel | Beauty |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
Children | Contemplation | Daughter | Death | Inevitable | Regard | Youth | Youth | Contemplation | Think |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn't mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself.
Children | Cooperation | Earth | Fun | Nature | Technology | World | Govern | Learn |