This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are correct, but in only one respect - only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes- but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked that flat-out whoring but only very marginally.
Care | Death | Depression | Friend | Lending | Life | Life | Loneliness | Love | Mind | Mistake | Need | Nothing | Office | Reason | Reflection | Sadness | Security | Time | Waiting | Will | Writing |
You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here
Circumstances | Decision | Little | Need |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,-- and the drops will slacken so; weep, weep--and the watch thou keepest, with a quicker count will go. Think,--the shadow on the dial for the nature most undone, marks the passing of the trial, proves the presence of the sun.
We are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure – your perfection – is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You believe in God, for your part?--that He who makes can make good things from ill things, best from worst, as men plant tulips upon dunghills when they wish them finest.
Conscience | God | Light | Love | Need | Nothing | Work | God |
The idea of feminine authority is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even after all these centuries of father-right the young child instinctively regards the mother as the supreme authority. He looks upon the father as equal with himself, equally subject to the woman's rule. Children have to be taught to love, honor, and respect the father, a task usually assumed by the mother.
Beginning | Man | Men | Method | Need | Society | Woman | Society |
It is not men that most women worry about when they rise to the defense of the status quo. Their apparent endorsement of male supremacy is, rather, a pathetic striving for self-respect, self-justification, and self-pardon. After fifteen hundred years of subjection to men, Western woman finds it almost unbearable to face the fact that she has been hoodwinked and enslaved by her inferiors — that the master is lesser than the slave.
I thought that prattling boys and girls would fill this empty room; that my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom. One child and two green graves are mine, this is God's gift to me; a bleeding, fainting, broken heart— This is my gift to Thee.
Need | Perfection | Reason | Will | Learn | Understand |
And if my heart be scarred and burned, the safer, I, for all I learned.
Proof that the penis is a much later development than the female vulva is found in the evidence that the male himself was a late mutation from an original female creature. For man is but an imperfect female. Geneticists and physiologists tell us that the Y chromosome that produces males is a deformed and broken X chromosome — the female chromosome. All women have two X chromosomes, while the male has one X derived from his mother and one Y from his father. It seems very logical that this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error — an accident of nature, and that originally there was only one sex — the female.
What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.
What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
This is the final test of the truth or untruth of a constructive or disintegrating philosophy of life. What increases man's sense of power, and therefore, for him, the content of life, is true. What tends to the diminishing of the store of moral resiliency and of the energy needed for resisting as well as for onward pushing is corrupting, and therefore marked by falsehood's taint.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man.
Abundance | Body | Conversation | Eternal | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Meditation | Money | Need | People | Reading | Spirit | Time | World | Think | Understand |
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
Why is the heart that is broken considered so much more valuable than the one or the two who must cause the pain lest they themselves perish?
Need |
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
In the common sense of the word, Judaism is not a religion, it is not a system of dogmas, of sacramental grace; it is not a bundle of rites and ceremonies; it is not a road to happiness in the hereafter; it is not a scheme of salvation from original sin; it does neither stand nor fall with our views as to the character of those books we call sacred, and as to their authorship. But it is a message to the world that righteousness must be its own reward, and is of that force which builds the world and shapes the courses of men.
Agnostic | Belief | Charity | God | Man | Mercy | Need | Pity | Thinkers | God | Agnostic |