This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
And where two raging fires meet together; they do consume the thing that feeds their fury. Though little fire grows great with little wind, yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all. Taming of the Shrew, Act ii, Scene 1
Gentleness | Pity | Will | Forgive |
But now will canker sorrow eat my bud And chase the native beauty from his cheek, And he will look as hollow as a ghost, As dim and meagre as an ague's fit, And so he'll die; and rising so again, When I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him. The Life and Death of King John (Constance at III, iv)
God himself has no right to be a tyrant.
Accident | Argument | Boldness | Censure | Deliberation | Earth | Excellence | Force | Man | Morality | Ostentation | Principles | Property | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Right | Sense | Will | Excellence | Deliberation |
If [we] have no chosen the kingdom of God [first], it will make in the end no difference what [we] have chosen instead.
Desire | Life | Life | Nothing | Perfection |
O my love, my wife! Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
O, but they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listened more than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose. More are men's ends marked than their lives before. The setting sun, and music at the close, as the last taste of sweets, is… Richard II, Act ii, Scene 1
Earth |
O, woe is me to have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
Life, struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–' 'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief) 'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone, and none was left to love in all the world.
There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Angels |
This guelder rose, at far too slight a beck of the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.
Angels |
Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.
I don't know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter--the eternity they have entered--where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness.
Distress | Grave | Heart | Life | Life | Light | Nothing | Past | Rest | Safe | Tears | Think |
What a strange development of patriotism that turns a thinking being into a loyal machine!
Democracy | Free press | Free speech | Opinion | Safe | Speech | War | World |
For we may ask in return, what has any secret purpose to do with our role of judgment and action? “Secret things,” we are told, “belong unto the Lord our God; but things which are revealed, unto us and to our children.” The question taken from the hidden purposes of the divine mind, can have no force whatever, because it is an appeal to our ignorance. We know, and can know nothing about them. One thing, however, we do know. God must be always and everywhere consistent with himself; and whether we can understand it or not, it is certain that there can be no inconsistency between revealed and unrevealed truths; and if God has made an offer of eternal life through the atonement unto all men, and commanded all men to embrace it, there cannot be in any purpose of God concerning its nature, anything which will clash with, and so contradict this universal offer.
Circumstances | Earth | God | Light | Means | Mistake | Nature | Necessity | Principles | System | Waste | Will | God | Guilty |