This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
But the Indias and Chinas are increasingly adding one more thing to low-cost labor and high-power technology: unfettered imagination–that is, high innovative and creative capabilities. They will focus first on solving their own problems with cheap labor, high technology, and high creativity–re-imagining their own futures… So, for the last time, you have been warned. This is not a test.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and the Congress has not.
Strength |
Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection.But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours.
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 |
It is better to live for one day as a tiger than to live for a thousand years as a sheep.
An honest man will never employ an equivocal expression; a confused man may often utter ambiguous ones without any design.
Principles | Religion | Strength | Will |
As I love the name of honour more than I fear death. Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2
Strength |
As by your high imperial majesty I had in charge at my depart for France, as procurator to your excellence, to marry Princess Margaret for your grace, so, in the famous ancient city Tours, in presence of the Kings of France and Sicil, the Dukes of Orleans, Calabar, Bretagne, and Alencon, seven earls, twelve barons, and twenty reverend bishops, I have performed my mask and was espoused. Henry VI, Act I, Scene 1
Abundance | Books | Ceremony | Fear | Heart | Love | Rage | Recompense | Strength | Learn |
Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. . . . This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy.
Force | Individual | Strength | Time |
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.