This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
We are not to be in doubt about the merits of; we should rather believe the testimonies of the angels that, after the fall into sin has been wiped away, he whom his faith has washed ascends cleansed. Let us believe that he has ascended from the desert, that is, from a dry and uncultivated place, to those flowering delights where, joined to his brother, he enjoys the pleasure of eternal life. Both are in bliss, if my prayers avail anything; no prayer of mine shall pass over without honoring you; in all my offerings I shall celebrate you. Who will forbid me to call you innocent?
Error | Faith | Forgiveness | Weakness | Forgiveness |
Stanislas de Boufflers, fully Marquis Stanislas-Jean de Boufflers, Chevalier de Boufflers
Oblivion is a second death, which great minds dread more than the first.
Sometimes we think, If only I had a great instrument—a Stradivarius, a supercomputer with great graphics, a fine, perfectly equipped sculpture studio—I could do anything with it. But an artist can take the cheapest instrument and do anything with it as well.
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.
Error | Grief | Imagination | Man | Science | Truth | Work | Truths |
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
Error | Organic | People | Learn | Understand |
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.
Children | Evil | Experience | Fury | Grave | Hope | Insecurity | Knowing | Life | Life | Mortal | Nothing | Parents | Revelation | Sense | Sound | Tenderness | Uncertainty | Understanding | Will |
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Error |
Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.
Error |
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
Error |
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.
Censor | Error | Majority | Office | Opinion | Persuasion | Reason | Uniformity | World |