This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
There is a time in the lives of most of us when, despondent of all joy in an earthly future, and tortured by conflicts between inclination and duty, we transfer all the passion and fervor of our troubled souls to enthusiastic yearnings for the divine love, looking to its mercy, and taking thence the only hopes that can cheer - the only strength that can sustain us.
Duty | Future | Inclination | Joy | Love | Mercy | Passion | Strength | Time | Wisdom | Yearnings |
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.
Absolute | Indifference | Men | Passion | Peace | Time | War | Wisdom | World |
There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.
Children | Mathematics | Music | Passion | People | Wisdom |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
A new philosophy, a way of life, is not given for nothing. It has to be paid dearly for and only acquired with much patience and great effort.
Effort | Life | Life | Nothing | Patience | Philosophy | Wisdom |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
If I were asked what single qualification was necessary for one who has the care of children, I should say patience - patience with their tempers, with their understandings, with their progress. It is not brilliant parts or great acquirements which are necessary for teachers, but patience to go over first principles again and again; steadily to add a little every day; never to be irritated by willful or accidental hindrance.
Care | Children | Day | Little | Patience | Principles | Progress | Wisdom |
We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things.
Absence | Accuracy | Art | Culture | Meaning | Passion | People | Wisdom | Wrong | Art |
‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter... In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ‘tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.
Good | Judgment | Little | Order | Passion | Reason | Wisdom | World |
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Compassion | Defiance | Despair | God | Harm | Love | Man | Passion | Strength | Thought | Wisdom | God | Thought |
Poetry begotten of passion is ever debasing; poetry born of real heartfulness, always ennobles and uplifts.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
Correctness | Passion | Wisdom |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.