This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
As Yin and Yang are not of the same nature, so man and woman have different characteristics. The distinctive quality of the Yang is rigidity; the function of the Yin is yielding. Man is honored for strength; a woman is beautiful on account of her gentleness. Hence there arose the common saying: "A man though born like a wolf may, it is feared, become a weak monstrosity; a woman though born like a mouse may, it is feared, become a tiger."
Appearance | Need | Virtue | Virtue | Woman | Words | Work |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams.
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Well, we never expected this! they all say. No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether! How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.
Attention | Beginning | Enlightenment | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Nothing | Order | People | Wishes | World | Old |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Would that, like the smoke of the watch-fires that mounts and vanishes at random in the empty sky, the smouldering flame of passion could burn itself away.
World |
There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
These three ancient customs epitomize woman's ordinary way of life and the teachings of the traditional ceremonial rites and regulations. Let a woman modestly yield to others; 1et her respect others; let her put others first, herself last. Should she do something good, let her not mention it; should she do something bad let her not deny it. Let her bear disgrace; let her even endure when others speak or do evil to her. Always let her seem to tremble and to fear. When a woman follows such maxims as these then she may be said to humble herself before others.
Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.
Man |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
Let a woman retire late to bed, but rise early to duties; let her nor dread tasks by day or by night. Let her not refuse to perform domestic duties whether easy or difficult. That which must be done, let her finish completely, tidily, and systematically, When a woman follows such rules as these, then she may be said to be industrious.
Character | Love | Order | Principles | Purity | Woman | Gossip |
The essence of the ludicrous consists in surprise,--in unexpected terms of feeling and explosions of thought,--often bringing dissimilar things together with a shock; as when some wit called Boyle, the celebrated philosopher, the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork.
Beauty | Contemplation | Beauty | Contemplation |
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.
Extravagance | Man | Men |
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
Observation of the first kind projects its own light on to things and can, therefore, only touch their surface; all it does is render its objects invisible. That of the second kind projects light into things and makes objects luminous in themselves.
The bride and bridegroom are happy at a wedding, but the guests go home unhappily.
Insight is within the grasp of the dreamer, for he escapes the waking intensity which tends to hold back the vitality that bids us carry on with life, often as underground levels. The eternal now instinctively carries us forward and contains within it knowledge and experience of the routes ahead, even though those routes are dimmed when we awaken to each day's new experiences. The prediction is clear in a dreaming world, but the route is clouded when we surface to live out the day's experience. The outer eye discerns only what is to be undertaken in a three-dimensional world.
Age | Dreams | Evolution | Giving | Happy | Man | Technology | World |