This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love to faults is always blind; Always is to joy inclin’d, Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d, And breaks all chains from every mind. Deceit to secrecy confin’d, Lawful, cautious and refin’d; To anything but interest blind, And forges fetters for the mind.
Benevolence | Burial | Divinity | Enemy | God | Man | Marriage | Men | Murder | Receive | Smile | Time | Will | Wishes | Worship | Friendship | God | Murder | Forgive | Friends |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Between subjective and objective there is no vital difference. Everything is illusive and more or less transparent. All phenomena, including man and his thoughts about himself, are nothing more than a movable, changeable alphabet. There are no solid facts to get hold of.
Art | Day | Influence | Life | Life | Means | Sense | Time | Will | Art |
The Holiness of Minute Particulars - And many conversèd on these things as they labour’d at the furrow, Saying: ‘It is better to prevent misery than to release from misery; It is better to prevent error than to forgive the criminal. Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth.… He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars, And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power: The Infinite alone resides in Definite and Determinate Identity. Establishment of Truth depends on destruction of Falsehood continually, On Circumcision, not on Virginity, O Reasoners of Albion!
Family | Good | Harmony | Land | Lord | Love | Man | Vengeance | Forgive |
But one day, some painter used ‘Abstraction’ as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title. And it wasn’t really a very good one. From then on the idea became something extra. Immediately it gave some people the idea that they could free art from itself. Until then, Art meant everything that was in it – not what you could take off it. There was only one thing you could take out of it sometime when you were in the right mood – that abstract and indefinable sensation, the aesthetic part – and still leave it were it was.
The humblest and the most unseen activity in the world can be the true worship of God. Work and worship literally become one. Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever; and man carries out that function when he does what God sent him into the world to do. Work well done rises like a hymn of praise to God. This means that the doctor on his rounds, the scientist in his laboratory, the teacher in his classroom, the musician at his music, the artist at his canvas, the shop assistant at his counter, the typist at her typewriter, the housewife in her kitchen -- all who are doing the work of the world as it should be done are joining in a great act of worship.
Discipline | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man | Prayer | Service | Study | Suspicion | Will |
William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett
Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectual deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.
It is in your character of Prime Minister that I take the liberty of prefixing your Lordship's name to this “Tale of Irish Famine”. Had Sir Robert Peel been in office, I would have placed his name where that of your Lordship now stands. There is something not improper in this; for although I believe that both you and he are sincerely anxious to benefit our unhappy country, still I cannot help thinking that the man who in his ministerial capacity, must be looked upon as a public exponent of those principals of Government which have brought our country to her present calamitous condition, by a long course of illiberal legislation and unjustifiable neglect, ought to have his name placed before a story which details with truth the sufferings which such legislation and neglect have entailed upon our people.
Example | Literature | Man | Men | Thought | Truth | Wealth | World | Talent | Thought |
Almost every house had a lonely and deserted look; for it was known that one or more beloved beings had gone out of it to the grave. A dark, heartless spirit was abroad. The whole land, in fact, mourned and nothing on which the eye could rest bore a green or thriving look or any symptom of activity, but the Churchyards, and here the digging and the delving were incessant - at the early twilight, during the gloomy noon, the dreary dusk, and the still more funereal-looking light of the midnight taper.
Character | Influence | Man | Superstition | Understand |
In conclusion, I have endeavored, with what success has been already determined by the voice of my own country, to give a panorama of Irish life among the people … and in doing this, I can say with solemn truth that I painted them honestly and without reference to the existence of any particular creed or party.
Adventure | Appetite | Battle | Beauty | Consciousness | Consequences | Father | Fighting | Friend | Influence | Love | Man | Means | Mirth | Nothing | Sense | Silence | Spirit | Vengeance | Will | Woe | Beauty | Friends |
What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy and in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain it is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun and in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn it is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted to speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer to listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season when the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs it is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements to hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan; to see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemies' house; to rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness that cuts off his children while our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door and our children bring fruits and flowers then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten and the slave grinding at the mill and the captive in chains and the poor in the prison and the soldier in the field when the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead it is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.
Strong feelings do not necessarily make a strong character. The strength of a man is to be measured by the power of the feelings he subdues not by the power of those which subdue him.
Apathy | Body | Existence | Impossibility | Influence | Man | Mind | People | Prayer | Sense | Soul | Thought | Thought |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
People who read stories are said to have excitable brains.
Experience | Influence | Mercy | Mission | Past |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Have you ever heard of such a thing as the fascination of terror?
Man |
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
It is not for you to say - you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering - it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at the secret self which smolders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquility of a man like me - sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am - but judge us not. In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice - the long luxury of your freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.
Desolation | Influence |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
I guess the only way to stop divorce is to stop marriage.
Right | World | Understand |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.