This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas.
By paralyzing the price mechanism . . . creates a situation which immediately calls for further and even greater intervention, transferring the regulating function so far carried out by the market to a government agency. If the government introduces rent ceilings, the divergence between supply and demand in the housing market grows ever greater as rents remain below the level which is necessary to promote construction and lessen demand. Consequently, the state is forced to go further and ration housing, as at the same time building activity collapses under these conditions, it must finally take over housing construction under its own management. In addition, this tends to lead to a "freezing" of the housing situation--everyone clinging to the home which he was lucky enough to get hold of, without making any adjustments if his family should decrease--and to a progressive diminution of mobility. This should teach us that the price mechanism is an essential part of the mechanism of our whole economic system and that one cannot do away with it without in the end being forced down a path leading to pure collectivism.
Change | Competition | People | Present | Strength | System | Will |
Let me take up your metaphor. Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.
As the years go by, give me but peace, freedom from ten thousand matters. I ask myself and always answer: What can be better than coming home? A wind from the pine-trees blows my sash, and my lute is bright with the mountain moon. You ask me about good and evil fortune?... Hark, on the lake there's a fisherman singing!
Experience | Global | Power | Strength |
Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else.
Beauty | Cause | Darkness | Desire | Existence | Health | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Love | Melancholy | Nature | Rest | Sorrow | Strength | Will | Woman | World | Friendship | Beauty |
Even in the middle of a hurricane, the bottom of the sea is calm. As the storm rages and the winds howl, the deep waters sway in gentle rhythm, a light movement of fish and plant life. Below there is no storm.
Ability | Courage | Equanimity | Experience | Feelings | Strength | Learn |
My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.
Endurance | Knowledge | People | Right | Strength | Thought | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
Strength is power in action. Beauty is the assemblage of all graces. The strength and the beauty, being connected with God's sanctuary, must be divine strength and divine beauty. In what, then, consist this strength and beauty which so emphasize and make distinctive His sanctuary?
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
It cannot be too strongly emphasized, in this day of secularism on the one hand and the love of a sensuous ceremonial on the other, that the true strength of the church does not lie in its historic continuity with the apostles' days; does not lie in its great creeds; does not lie in its hallowed liturgy; does not lie in its learned ministry; does not lie in its churches and cathedrals--it may have all these, and yet, like the apostolic church of Sardis, have a name to live, and yet be dead. Its apostolic ministry may be apostolic in lineage and not in spirit; its grand creeds may be but great petrifactions of orthodox faith; its venerable liturgy may be but the embroidered cerements of a corpse; its beautiful churches and basilicas may be but mausoleums of a lifeless worship. What the church must have, and by which only it can live, is the constant, realized, positive indwelling of the Holy Ghost. All our worship, all our teaching, must be subordinated to this divine Spirit.
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
Such in spirit is our prayer to-day. Make this house, O Lord God, Thy resting-place… Thy devout people, who worship here, ever rejoice in God's goodness, and shout aloud His praises in the beauty of holiness. Thus shall the services of this house prepare us for the higher services of the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; and may this edifice prove to many successive generations of worshipers, as they pass in long-procession through these courts, none other but the house of God and the very gate of heaven.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.
Contempt | Ideals | Looks | Revelation | Self | Sense | Soul | Strength | World |