This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence
What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom... The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences... the world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. It can't pigeon-hole a new experience.
Experience | Fear | Freedom | Genius | Laughter | Man | Men | Wisdom | World | Old |
Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity.
Attainment | Birth | Ends | Family | Future | God | Illusion | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nature | Race | Society | Will | Wisdom | Youth | Youth | Trouble | Happiness |
Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to a formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of accomplishment in living, and the depth of insight into beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.
Accomplishment | Beauty | Challenge | Insight | Laughter | Loneliness | Love | Nature | Pain | Science | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Friendship | Beauty | Value |
The acceptance of truth that joy and sorrow, laughter and tears are not confined to any particular time, place or people, but are universally distributed, should make us more tolerant of and more interested in the lives of others.
Acceptance | Joy | Laughter | People | Sorrow | Tears | Time | Truth | Wisdom |
Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
The end is the source of everything that exists in the cause and the end of everything that exists in the effect... end, cause and effect, exist in the greatest and least things... To think from ends is the method of wisdom, from causes that of intelligence, and from effects that of knowledge. From this it may be seen that all perfection increases in and according to the ascent to higher degrees.
Cause | Ends | Intelligence | Knowledge | Method | Perfection | Wisdom | Think |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
When a child begins to move in the midst of the objects that surround him, he is instinctively led to appropriate to himself everything that he can lay his hands upon; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be despoiled, he becomes more circumspect, and he ends by respecting those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. The principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own.
Ends | Man | Property | Rights | Wisdom | Wishes | Child | Value |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends something.
There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Eternal | Excellence | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |
R. W. Dixon, fully Richard Watson Dixon
THERE is a soul above the soul of each, A mightier soul, which yet to each belongs: There is a sound made of all human speech, And numerous as the concourse of all songs: And in that soul lives each, in each that soul, Though all the ages are its lifetime vast; Each soul that dies, in its most sacred whole Receiveth life that shall forever last. And thus forever with a wider span Humanity o’erarches time and death; Man can elect the universal man, And live in life that ends not with his breath: And gather glory that increase still Till Time his glass with Death’s last dust shall fill.