This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The source of my suffering and loneliness is deep in my heart. This is a disease no doctor can cure. Only Union with the Friend can cure it. Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word My choicest hours Are the hours I spend with You – O God, I can’t live in this world Without remembering You– How can I endure the next world Without seeing Your face? I am a stranger in Your country And lonely among Your worshippers: This is the substance of my complaint. " - Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya, aka Rabi'a of Basra or Basri, Saint Rabia of Basra
"There is a passion in me, that doesn't long for anything, from another human being. I was given something else, a hat, to wear in both worlds. It fell off. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear, each secret fishy hope or fear. Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond; but is there anything beyond? This life cannot be all, they swear, for how unpleasant, if it were! One may not doubt that, somehow, Good Shall come of Water and of Mud; And, sure, the reverent eye must see a Purpose in Liquidity." - Rupert Brooke
"Murder and theft have been committed since the earliest history of mankind, but that fact has not made murder meritorious or larceny legal." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"I practice going home by walking, sitting, and doing things in mindfulness so I do not lose myself." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right... The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important. In our age everything has to be a ‘problem.’ Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety. Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem." - Thomas Merton
"Just surrender to the cycle of things, Give yourself to the waves of the Great Change, And when it is time to go, then simply go, Without any unnecessary fuss" - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL
"Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons." - Wendell Berry
"To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of the cutting edge in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production." - Wendell Berry
"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy
"Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"One of the by-products of the state of dhyan is that fearlessness is awakened. Fearlessness is very different from bravery. Bravery is an attribute of the mind, which can be and has been cultivated by the state, religion and family for their own purpose, but it is an attribute that can also be lost. Once fearlessness is awakened it can never be extinguished, fear no longer enters the mind. Fearlessness is awakened when man has faith either in his own understanding or has faith in the Universal Intelligence." - Vimala Thakar
"He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Have no fear to not know where you are going in life." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If they love you, you can have all. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, the money of the dog during the dog - anything. If they love will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every sense of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will mentally endowed with all good qualities that you never really developed in yourself and I will buy Christmas gifts for the whole family. I'll give you the sun and the rain, and if not available, I'll keep my tickets later. I'll give you all this and more, until you feel so exhausted and depleted that the only way to restore your energy will be carried away by someone else. did not report these facts for themselves with pride, but it has always been." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I’m not laughing. I was actually crying. And please don’t laugh at me now, but I think the reason it’s so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate. He probably was. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this one go. It’s over, Groceries. David’s purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of your marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it’s over. Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.But I love him. So love him. But I miss him. So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you’ll be really alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she’s really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, Groceries. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with the doorway? It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using David to block that door. Let it go." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I'm so excited about school. I'm such a shameless student. I laid my clothes out last night, just like I did before my first day of first grade, with my patent leather shoes and my new lunch box. I hope the teacher will like me." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Listen to me. Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"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." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"It was a quiet way - he asked if I was his - I made no answer of the tongue but answer of the eyes - and then he bore me on before this mortal noise with swiftness, as of chariots and distance, as of wheels. This world did drop away as acres from the feet of one that leaneth from balloon upon an ether street. The gulf behind was not, the continents were new - eternity was due. No seasons were to us - it was not night nor morn - but sunrise stopped upon the place and fastened in dawn." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"This book is fiction, but there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
"I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane