This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.
Consequences | Defeat | Enemy | Will |
If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America. Made up as it is of people from different nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a court rioting at its expense. Their taxes are few, because their government is just: and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there is nothing to engender riots and tumults.
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
O gather me the rose, the rose, While yet in flower we find it, For summer smiles, but summer goes, And winter waits behind it. For with the dream foregone, foregone, The deed foreborn forever, The worm Regret will canker on, And time will turn him never. So were it well to love, my love, And cheat of any laughter The fate beneath us, and above, The dark before and after. The myrtle and the rose, the rose, The sunshine and the swallow, The dream that comes, the wish that goes The memories that follow!
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike. The men who returned from the third attempt to climb Mount Everest, made in the summer of 1924, have told us that from now on the character of the endeavor is clearly defined in advance. One of them has recently said that the higher altitudes, from 22,000 to 28,000 feet, reached by the last party, were attained not by sportsmen and scientists breaking the mountain to their intention, but by men who had come to feel towards the mountain an almost mystical relationship. He said that the mountain itself, with its tremendous appeal, must take men to the top, and that only a spirit, which for the want of any other accurate word must be called religion, would ever carry men the last exacting two thousand feet. What he seems to mean is that, in the presence of that imperious and majestic reality, the cheap coercive attempt to conquer the world must always break down, and that only something like the spirit of worship can draw and lift men at the last. The climbing of Mount Everest has ceased to be purely a geographical, political, and physiological problem. It has passed, as every great human endeavor must finally pass, into the realm of religion. And only the man whose peace is found in the imperious will of that terrific reality will ever stand upon its summit. After he had dragged the blankets out of the empty tent at Camp VI, high up on the shoulder of Everest, and had laid them in a “T” on the snow to tell the watchers below that there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine, Odell closed the flap of the tent and began the third retreat to India. “I glanced up,” he says, “at the mighty summit above me, which ever and anon deigned to reveal its cloud-wreathed features. It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and to howl derision in wind gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—the mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess, or much more to sling at her our blasphemous challenges. If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomo Lungma—the Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows—had we violated it, was I now violating it? Had we approached her with due reverence and singleness of heart and purpose?” That, in modern parable, is the crux of the temptation in the wilderness. Magic in us dies and religion is born with that question which, if rightly answered, prefaces the true reference of the soul to God. What right have I to make trial of my God? Have I violated his holy being with my self-will? Have I approached him with due reverence and singleness of mind and heart?
Bible | Commerce | Defeat | Disillusionment | Eternal | God | Health | Heart | Idleness | Lord | Magic | Man | Men | Mind | Religion | Right | Spirit | Story | Struggle | Temper | Temptation | Universe | Will | World | Commerce | God | Bible | Old | Temptation |
Since beauty is honoured all over the Empire, How could Xi Shi remain humbly at home? -- Washing clothes at dawn by a southern lake -- And that evening a great lady in a palace of the north: Lowly one day, no different from the others, The next day exalted, everyone praising her. No more would her own hands powder her face Or arrange on her shoulders a silken robe. And the more the King loved her, the lovelier she looked, Blinding him away from wisdom. ...Girls who had once washed silk beside her Were kept at a distance from her chariot. And none of the girls in her neighbours' houses By pursing their brows could copy her beauty.
Affront | Cause | Day | Effort | Looks | Men | Retirement | Right | World | Youth | Youth | Old |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say. The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple: I should say, love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way — and if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Argument | Authority | Dissent | Evidence | Fear | Husband | Inconvenient | Intelligence | Opinion | Pleasure | Power | Respect | Thinking | Truth | Will | Worth | Respect | Happiness | Old | Think | Value |
TERRIFIÈD at Non-Existence— For such they deem’d the death of the body—Los his vegetable hands Outstretch’d; his right hand, branching out in fibrous strength, Seiz’d the Sun; his left hand, like dark roots, cover’d the Moon, And tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense. Then fell the fires of Eternity, with loud and shrill Sound of loud Trumpet, thundering along from heaven to heaven, A mighty sound articulate: ‘Awake! ye Dead, and come To Judgement from the four winds! awake, and come away!’ Folding like scrolls of the enormous volume of Heaven and Earth, With thunderous noise and dreadful shakings, rocking to and fro, The Heavens are shaken, and the Earth removèd from its place; The foundations of the eternal hills discover’d. The thrones of Kings are shaken, they have lost their robes and crowns; The Poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest; 1 The naked warriors rush together down to the seashore, Trembling before the multitudes of slaves now set at liberty: They are become like wintry flocks, like forests stripp’d of leaves. The Oppressèd pursue like the wind; there is no room for escape.… The Books of Urizen unroll with dreadful noise! The folding Serpent Of Orc began to consume in fierce raving fire; his fierce flames Issu’d on all sides, gathering strength in animating volumes, Roaring abroad on all the winds, raging intense, reddening Into resistless pillars of fire, rolling round and round, gathering Strength from the earths consum’d, and heavens, and all hidden abysses, Where’er the Eagle has explor’d, or Lion or Tiger trod, Or where the comets of the night, or stars of day Have shot their arrows or long-beamèd spears in wrath and fury. And all the while the Trumpet sounds. From the clotted gore, and from the hollow den Start forth the trembling millions into flames of mental fire, Bathing their limbs in the bright visions of Eternity. Then, like the doves from pillars of smoke, the trembling families Of women and children throughout every nation under heaven Cling round the men in bands of twenties and of fifties, pale As snow that falls round a leafless tree upon the green. Their oppressors are fall’n; they have stricken them; they awake to life. Yet, pale, the Just man stands erect, and looking up to Heav’n. Trembling and strucken by the universal stroke, the trees unroot; The rocks groan horrible and run about; the mountains and Their rivers cry with a dismal cry; the cattle gather together, Lowing they kneel before the heavens; the wild beasts of the forests Tremble. The Lion, shuddering, asks the Leopard: ‘Feelest thou The dread I feel, unknown before? My voice refuses to roar, And in weak moans I speak to thee. This night, Before the morning’s dawn, the Eagle call’d the Vulture, The Raven call’d the Hawk. I heard them from my forests, Saying: “Let us go up far, for soon I smell upon the wind A terror coming from the South.” The Eagle and Hawk fled away At dawn, and ere the sun arose, the Raven and Vulture follow’d. Let us flee also to the North.’ They fled. The Sons of Men Saw them depart in dismal droves. The trumpets sounded loud, And all the Sons of Eternity descended into Beulah.
Earth | Happy | Heaven | Life | Life | Pity | Pride | Tears | Will | Forgive |
Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Die goldene Medina. The accent was not on the golden (except in the sense of some mysterious Light), but on the Medina - that is, the city of hope, the city of deliverance.
Cost | Defeat | Hope | Infamy | Sense | Soul | Struggle | Suffering | Tragedy |
It is precisely this "simplicity" in human intercourse that is so incomprehensible to the armored organism. Everything natural and profound is simple. The simple, grand lines of emotional expression are known to characterize the great painter, musician, poet, novelist and scientist. But the simple is alien to the armored organism. Its impulses are so complicated in their form of expression, the manner of their utterance is so muddled and contradictory that it has no organ for the simple and unequivocal emotional expression. It even lacks a sense of simplicity. Its love is mixed with hatred and anxiety. The unarmored organism loves unequivocally in love situations, hates unequivocally where hatred is legitimate, and fears unequivocally where fear is rational. The armored organism hates where it should love, loves where it should hate, and is frightened where it should love or hate. Complexity is the specific life expression of the armored person He is trapped, as it were, in the multiple contradictions of his existence. Since he approaches all experiences with his complex character structure, his experiences become equally complicated. He is amazed at the accomplishments in the area of special talent barred to him. "Genius" become a kind of abnormal monster, because he cannot understand the great simplicity in the life expression of "genius." In the consistent stripping away of the layers of character, one discovers that complexity epitomizes the defensive mechanism in its purest form. The armored person is complicated because he has a mortal terror of everything simple, straightforward and direct. I say: mortal terror. This is no literary exaggeration. The word accurately describes the process: the simple, straightforward, direct expression inescapably leads periodically to orgastic plasma convulsions.
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
Democracy | Force | Majority | Rule | Sacred | War | Trouble |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound.
Achievement | Age | Attention | Present | Sense | Tyranny | World |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
Defeat | Dependence | Doctrine | Heart | Knowing | Knowledge | Language | Literature | Means | Method | Mind | People | Popularity | Time | Understanding |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
This 'real' nature with whose revelation the Chan Masters are primarily concerned, or the Atman-'I' of the Vedantists, is not the far-off, unreachable will-o'-the-wisp we are apt to imagine, but just the within of which we know the without. It is just the other side of the medal, and it lies wherever our senses and our intellect cease to function.
The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
Ability | Abundance | Defeat | Desire | Evidence | Hope | Ignorance | Knowledge | Problems | Revelation | World |
He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.