This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What a strange power there is in silence! How many resolutions are formed, how many sublime conquests effected, during that pause when lips are closed, and the soul secretly feels the eye of her Maker upon her! They are the strong ones of earth who know how to keep silence when it is a pain and grief unto them, and who gives time to their own souls to wax strong against temptation.
Earth | Grief | Pain | Power | Silence | Soul | Temptation | Time |
I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor or difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep vigilant eye on many sources of error.
Love harmonizes the three powers of our soul, and binds them together. The will, with ineffable love, follows what the eye of the understanding has beheld; and, with its strong hand, it stores up in the memory the treasure that id draws from this love.
Love | Memory | Soul | Understanding | Will |
Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
Prayer is the wing wherewith the soul flies to heaven, and meditation the eye wherewith we see God.
God | Heaven | Meditation | Prayer | Soul |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
The space of a needle's eye suffices for two friends, while the universe itself is not wide enough for two enemies.
On the science of beauty everywhere - Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forthe and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.
Beauty | Friend | God | Man | Mind | Mortal | Reality | Science | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Beauty | God |
Oliver Lodge, fully Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge
Nothing is too great or too good to be true. Do not believe that we can imagine things better than they are. In the long run, in the ultimate outlook, in the eye of the Creator, the possibilities of existence, the possibilities open to us, are beyond our imagination.
Better | Existence | Good | Imagination | Nothing |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
If the eye never sleeps, all dreams will naturally cease. If the mind makes no discriminations, then ten thousand things are as they are, of single essence. to understand the mystery of this One-essence is to be released from all entanglements. When all things are seen equally the timeless Self-essence is reached. No comparisons or analogies are possible in this causeless, relationless state.
Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
Art | Control | Dreams | Effort | Eternal | Eternity | Events | Heart | Illusion | Imagination | Important | Intention | Life | Life | Question | Rationality | Respect | Sensibility | Soul | Surrender | Time | Respect | Art |
To me, fair friend, you never can be old, for as you were when first your eye I eyed, such seems your beauty still.
They whose guilt within their bosom lies imagine every eye beholds their blame.
The error of our eye directs our mind: what error leads must err.