This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Even the courageous acceptance of interior trials in utter solitude cannot altogether compensate for the work of purification accomplished in us by patience and humility in loving other men and sympathizing with their most unreasonable needs and demands." - Thomas Merton
"Everything healthy, everything certain, everything holy, if we can find such things, they all need to be emphasized and articulated. For this it is necessary that there be communication between the hearts and minds of men, communication and not the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés. Communication is becoming more and more difficult, and… speech is in danger of perishing or being perverted in the amplified noise of beasts…. There is, it seems to me, every reason why we should attempt to cry out to one another and comfort one another, in so far as this may be possible, with the truth of Christ and also with the truth of humanism and reason. For faith cannot not be preserved if … man is destroyed: that is to say if his humanity is utterly debased and mechanized, while he himself remains on earth as the instrument of enormous and unidentified forces like those which press us inexorably to the brink of cataclysms." - Thomas Merton
"God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief… than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it." - Thomas Merton
"If there are no self-evident first principles, as a foundation for reasoning to conclusions that are not immediately apparent, how can you construct any kind of a philosophy? If you have to prove even the basic axioms of your metaphysics, you will never have a metaphysics, because you will never have any strict proof of anything, for your first proof will involve you in an infinite regress, proving that you are proving what you are proving and so on, into the exterior darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If Descartes thought it was necessary to prove his own existence by the fact that he was thinking, and that his though therefore existed in some subject, how did he prove that he was thinking in the first place? But as to the second step, that God must exist because Descartes had a clear idea of him – that never convinced me, then or at any other time, or now either. There are much better proofs for the existence of God than that one." - Thomas Merton
"Let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are “part of” something—although we are not quite able to define what that something is—and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for “reality.”" - Thomas Merton
"The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his striving – by which man becomes one with God." - Thomas Merton
"The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable" - Thomas Merton
"The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less." - Thomas Paine
"Timid and interested politicians think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
"Never seek to tell thy love love that never told can be; for the gentle wind does move silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; trembling, cold, in ghastly fears ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me a traveler came by silently, invisibly- he took her with a sigh." - William Blake
"You may now ask how it can be true that this image of God, which is man’s soul, can be restored to His likeness here in this life; it would seem to be impossible. You must admit you are very far from such a position. If it were restored we would possess sound understanding, clear vision, and pure ardent Love of God and Spiritual things all of the time. Your thoughts, your reason and affections of the soul are so immersed in Earthly things that your have little perception of Spiritual things." - Walter Hilton
"By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition, of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt. What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow. (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house and grounds)" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"I do not forget any good deed done to me & I do not carry a grudge for a bad one." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"I was lying on the hard boards in an earthen hut where about seventy of us were 'taken care of.' We were sick and did not have to leave camp for work; we did not have to go on parade. We could lie all day in our little corner in the hut and doze and wait for the daily distribution of bread (which . . . was reduced for the sick) and for the daily helping of soup (watered down and also decreased in quantity). But how content we were; happy in spite of everything. While we cowered against each other to avoid any unnecessary loss of warmth, and were too lazy and disinterested to move a finger unnecessarily, we heard shrill whistles and shouts from the square where the night shift had just returned and was assembling for roll call. The door was flung open, and the snowstorm blew into our hut. An exhausted comrade, covered with snow, stumbled inside to sit down for a few minutes. But the senior warden turned him out again. It was strictly forbidden to admit a stranger to a hut while a check-up on the men was in progress. How sorry I was for that fellow and how glad not to be in his skin at that moment, but instead to be sick and able to doze on in the sick quarters! What a lifesaver it was to have two days there, and perhaps even two extra days after those!" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Naturally only a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual heights. But a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure and death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would have never achieved. To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be applied: Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"On my fourth day in the sick quarters I had just been detailed to the night shift when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends (and despite the fact that almost none of my colleagues offered their services), I decided to volunteer. I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time. But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer that I was then." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The very moment when my friend came back, the camp gate was thrown open. A splendid, aluminum-colored car, on which were painted large red crosses slowly rolled on to the parade ground. A delegate from the International Red Cross in Geneva had arrived, and the camp and its inmates were under his protection. The delegate billeted himself in a farmhouse in the vicinity, in order to be near the camp at all times in case of emergency. Who worried about escape now? Boxes with medicines, were unloaded from the car, cigarettes were distributed, we were photographed and joy reigned supreme. Now there was no need for us to risk running towards the fighting line [in order to try to escape to the allies through the fighting line]." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Do not tremble in fear but become strong and courageous instead." - Yajur Veda, or Yajurveda
"Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
"The Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when it has nothing to fear." - Thucydides NULL
"Not to the ensanguin'd field of death alone is valor limited: she sits serene in the deliberate council, sagely scans the source of action: weighs, prevents, provides, and scorns to count her glories, from the feats of brutal force alone." - Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett
"But it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common." - William Shakespeare
"The essence of the ludicrous consists in surprise,--in unexpected terms of feeling and explosions of thought,--often bringing dissimilar things together with a shock; as when some wit called Boyle, the celebrated philosopher, the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Even the courageous acceptance of interior trials in utter solitude cannot altogether compensate for the work of purification accomplished in us by patience and humility in loving other men and sympathizing with their most unreasonable needs and demands." - Thomas Merton
"Everything healthy, everything certain, everything holy, if we can find such things, they all need to be emphasized and articulated. For this it is necessary that there be communication between the hearts and minds of men, communication and not the noise of slogans or the repetition of clichés. Communication is becoming more and more difficult, and… speech is in danger of perishing or being perverted in the amplified noise of beasts…. There is, it seems to me, every reason why we should attempt to cry out to one another and comfort one another, in so far as this may be possible, with the truth of Christ and also with the truth of humanism and reason. For faith cannot not be preserved if … man is destroyed: that is to say if his humanity is utterly debased and mechanized, while he himself remains on earth as the instrument of enormous and unidentified forces like those which press us inexorably to the brink of cataclysms." - Thomas Merton
"God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief… than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it." - Thomas Merton
"If there are no self-evident first principles, as a foundation for reasoning to conclusions that are not immediately apparent, how can you construct any kind of a philosophy? If you have to prove even the basic axioms of your metaphysics, you will never have a metaphysics, because you will never have any strict proof of anything, for your first proof will involve you in an infinite regress, proving that you are proving what you are proving and so on, into the exterior darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If Descartes thought it was necessary to prove his own existence by the fact that he was thinking, and that his though therefore existed in some subject, how did he prove that he was thinking in the first place? But as to the second step, that God must exist because Descartes had a clear idea of him – that never convinced me, then or at any other time, or now either. There are much better proofs for the existence of God than that one." - Thomas Merton
"Let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are “part of” something—although we are not quite able to define what that something is—and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for “reality.”" - Thomas Merton
"The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his striving – by which man becomes one with God." - Thomas Merton
"The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable" - Thomas Merton
"The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less." - Thomas Paine
"Timid and interested politicians think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
"Never seek to tell thy love love that never told can be; for the gentle wind does move silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; trembling, cold, in ghastly fears ah, she doth depart. Soon as she was gone from me a traveler came by silently, invisibly- he took her with a sigh." - William Blake
"You may now ask how it can be true that this image of God, which is man’s soul, can be restored to His likeness here in this life; it would seem to be impossible. You must admit you are very far from such a position. If it were restored we would possess sound understanding, clear vision, and pure ardent Love of God and Spiritual things all of the time. Your thoughts, your reason and affections of the soul are so immersed in Earthly things that your have little perception of Spiritual things." - Walter Hilton
"By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"Faith always presented to the mind the idea of an abnormal intellectual condition, of the subversion or suspension of the critical faculties. It sometimes comprised more than this, but it always included this. It was the opposite of doubt and of the spirit of doubt. What irreverent men called credulity, reverent men called faith; and although one word was more respectful than the other, yet the two words were with most men strictly synonymous." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow. (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house and grounds)" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf