This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.
Little |
The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.
Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.
Whatever difference may appear in the fortunes of mankind, there is, nevertheless, a certain compensation of good and evil which makes them equal.
What is commonly called friendship is no more than a partnership; a reciprocal regard for one another's interests, and an exchange of good offices; in a word, a mere traffic, wherein self-love always proposes to be a gainer.
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.
What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that they think themselves cleverer than we are.
O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)
Conscience | Cunning | Defeat | Devil | Father | Force | Gall | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Murder | Oppression | Passion | Play | Power | Property | Revenge | Soul | Spirit | Tears | Weakness | Will | Words | Murder | Guilty |
Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,--spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.
Conscience | Mercy | World |
One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion and passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing submission with weakness, whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.
Balance | Conscience | Ends | Journey | Right | Style | Woman |
But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
Conscience | Reading |
Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you.
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You believe in God, for your part?--that He who makes can make good things from ill things, best from worst, as men plant tulips upon dunghills when they wish them finest.
Conscience | God | Light | Love | Need | Nothing | Work | God |
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Authority | Conscience | Doubt | Fear | Justice | Knowledge | Position | Public | Responsibility | Struggle | Terror | Guilty | Understand |
God . . . sanctified the Sabbath, when he selected it out of the course of other days, and set it apart from the common employments and services of life; ordaining that the spiritual concernments of his glory and our salvation should be therein especially transacted. And this is that blessing which God hath conferred upon this day. For what other benefit is a day capable of, but only, that, when the other six days, like the unregarded vulgar of the year, were to be employed in the low and sordid drudgery of earthly affairs. This Seventh Day God hath raised from the dunghill, and set upon the throne, appointing it, according to Ignatius's phrase, "The prince and sovereign of days," exempting it form all servile works; and designing it for such spiritual and celestial employments, that, were it observed according to God's command, eternity itself would not have much advantage above it, but only that it is longer. So that, in the ring of the week, the Sabbath is the jewel, the most excellent and precious of days.
Conscience | God | God |
None have assurance at all times. As in a walk that is shaded with trees and checkered with light and shadow, some tracks and paths in it are dark and others are sunshine. Such is usually the life of the most assured.
Conscience | God | God |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
Conscience | Time | Think |