This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In a party fight, a prophetic sense of danger, hangs, as it were, over the crowd - the very air is loaded with apprehension; and the vengeance burst is proceeded by a close, thick darkness, almost sulphury, that is more terrifical than the conflict itself, though dearly less dangerous and fatal. The scowl of the opposing parties, the blanched cheeks, the knit brows, and the grinding teeth, not pretermitting the deadly gleams that shoot from their kindled eyes, are ornaments which a plain battle between factions cannot boast, but which, notwithstanding, are very suitable to the fierce and gloomy silence of that premeditated vengeance which burns with such intensity in the heart, and scorches up the vitals into such a thirst for blood. Not but that they come by different means to the same conclusion; because it is the feeling, and not altogether the manner of operation, that is different. / Now a faction fight doesn’t resemble this at all at all. Paddy’s at home here; all song, dance, good-humor, and affection. His cheek is flushed with delight, which, indeed, may derive assistance from the consciousness of having no bayonets or loaded carabines to contend with; but anyhow, he’s at home - his eye is lit with real glee - he tosses his hat in the air, in the height of mirth - and leaps, like a mounteback, two yards from the ground. Then, with what a gracious dexterity he brandishes his cudgel! what a joyous spirit is heard in his shout at the face of a friend from another faction! His very “who!” is contagious, and would make a man, that had settled on running away, return and join the sport with an appetite truly Irish. He is, in fact, while under the influence of this heavenly afflatus, in love with every one, man, woman, and child. If he meet his sweetheart, he will give her a kiss and a hug, and that with double kindness, because he is on his way to thrash her father or brother. It is the acumen of his enjoyment; and woe be to him who will adventure to go between him and his amusements. To be sure, skulls and bones are broken, and lives lost; but they are lost in pleasant fighting - they are the consequences of the sport, the beauty of which consists in breaking as many heads and necks as you can; and certainly when a man enters into the spirit of any exercise, there is nothing like elevating himself to the point of excellence. Then a man ought never to be disheartened. If you lose this game, or get your head good-humoredly beaten to pieces, why you may win another, or your friends may mollify two or three skulls as a set-off to yours; but that is nothing.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
A man should never neglect his family for business.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
To be in any form, what is that? (round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,) if nothing lay more develop'd the quahung in it's callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell. I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop, they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and I am happy, to touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand.
At the piano, scales, arpeggios and chords, the morning exercises, the afternoon's reading, the night's reflection, that's how to produce a virtuoso.
Sound |
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
Consciousness | Discovery | Evolution | Knowing | Self | Discovery |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Laws enacted to help its citizens have also begun to scare them!
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing, I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion, Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth. I am the swathed figure in the hairdresser's shop taking up only so much space.
Action | Contempt | Harm | Men | Thought | Thought | Understand |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
Consider Christmas. Could Satan in his most malignant mood have devised a worse combination of graft plus bunkum than the system whereby several hundred million people get a billion or so gifts for which they have no use, and some thousands of shop clerks die of exhaustion while selling them, and every other child in the Western world is made ill from overeating all in the name of the lowly Jesus.
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
Cause | Experience | Pleasure |
Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them, and the life that is in it, that shall live on and on forever, and each one of you part of it, while many a man's life upon the earth from the earth shall wane.
O God of battles, steel my soldiers' hearts. Possess them not with fear. Take from them now the sense of reckoning, ere th' opposed numbers pluck their hearts from them.
Now my love is thaw'd; which, like a waxen image 'gainst a fire, bears no impression of the thing it was.
Now I will believe that there are unicorns; that in Arabia there is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one Phoenix at this hour reigning there.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
For we have thought the longer thoughts and gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; to serve one master in the night, another in the day.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I said, 'Who killed him?' and he said 'I don't know who killed him, but he's dead all right,' and it was dark and there was water standing in the street and no lights or windows broke and boats all up in the town and trees blown down and everything all blown and I got a skiff and went out and found my boat where I had her inside Mango Key and she was right only she was full of water.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.
Ability | Death | Despise | Harm | Necessity | Responsibility | Talent |