This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
No woman wrote Procedure , Moby Dick or the Seven Pillars of Wisdom . They do not deny the human condition, because they begin to take it fully. This explains why his works lack the metaphysical resonance and humor black: they do not put the world in brackets, do not you ask questions, do not denounce the contradictions: take it seriously.
Art | Distinguish | Distress | Little | Love | Work | World | Trouble | Art |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.
Courage | Curiosity | Familiarity |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them.
Benedict of Nursia, aka Saint Benedict of Nursia NULL
For at all times we must so serve Him with the good things He has given us, that he may not, as an angry Father, disinherit his children, nor as a dread Lord, provoked by our evil deeds, deliver us to everlasting punishment as wicked servants who refuse to follow Him to glory.
Because the delusions have no firm foundation in reality, they can be overcome by wisdom. (Or, to put it another way, they can be penetrated by insight.) Wisdom is the positive, clarifying mental factor that shows you the way things actually are, not the way you falsely imagine them to be. The other positive states of mind and heart, such as love and compassion, aren’t threatened by wisdom at all. In fact, they’re strengthened by it. Indeed, some traditions of Buddhism teach that wisdom, love, and compassion are inherent qualities that lie at the core of your being. These positive qualities...
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.
Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.
Imagination | Thought | Thought |
At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.
Existence | Experience | God | Life | Life | Ridicule | Trust | God |
My position as regards the monied interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run, identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.
There was silence deep as death, and the boldest held his breath for a time.
Day |
Let Time and Chance combine, combine! Let Time and Chance combine! The fairest love from heaven above, that love of yours was mine, my Dear! That love of yours was mine.
Earnestness | Wants | Will |
Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
There is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.
W. J. Dawson. fully William James Dawson
A Child's Portrait - Her face is hushed in perfect calm, Her lips half-open hint the psalm The angels sing, who wear God’s palm: And in her eyes a liquid light, With somewhat of a starry sheen, Comes welling upward from the white And vestal soul that throbs within. A golden tangle is her hair That holds the sunlight in its snare; And one pure lily she doth wear In her white robe: and she doth seem A flower-like creature, who will fade If suns strike down too rude a beam, Or winds blow roughly on her shade. The golden ladders of the Dawn Meet at her feet, where on the lawn She stands, in tender thought withdrawn: And little wonder would it be, If on those slanting stairs she trod, And, with one farewell smile toward me, Were caught into the smile of God.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
Cost | Excitement | Present | Words |
The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.
Love |