This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance.
Acquaintance | Character | Family | Lying | Merit | People | Temptation | Temptation |
The only certainty is that we are here, in this moment, in this now. It’s up to us: to live fully, experiencing each moment, aware, alert and attentive. We are here, each one of us, to write our own story - and what fascinating stories we make!
Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through is history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are a part to be construed... Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious strutters in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resource. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition fro heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.
Character | Children | Heart | History | Man | Men | Order | Practice | Question | Right | Sense | Society | Story | Tradition | Truth | Understanding | Words | Society | Learn | Understand |
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Truth is always consistent with itself, and needs nothing to help it out. It is always near at hand, and sits upon our lips, and is ready to drop out before we are aware; whereas a lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack; and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.
Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over-flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance.
Acquaintance | Family | Lying | Merit | People | Temptation | Wisdom | Temptation |
Paul Flory, fully Paul John Flory
Significant inventions are not mere accidents... Happenstance usually plays a part, to be sure, but there is much more to invention than the popular notion of a bolt out of the blue. Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequisites. Unless the mind is thoroughly changed beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite.
Genius | Invention | Knowledge | Mind | Nothing | Will | Wisdom |
David Frost, fully Sir David Paradine Frost
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
Invention | People | Television | Wisdom |
The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.
The children who go to bed hungry in a Harlem slum or a West Virginia mining town are not being deprived because no food can be found to give them; they are going to bed hungry because, despite all our miracles of invention and production, we have not yet found a way to make necessities of life available to all of our citizens - including those whose failure is not lack of personal industry or initiative, but only an unwise choice of parents.
Children | Choice | Failure | Industry | Initiative | Invention | Life | Life | Miracles | Parents | Wisdom | Failure |
Whatever therefore is consequent to a tie of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Culture | Danger | Death | Earth | Enemy | Fear | Force | Industry | Invention | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Men | Security | Society | Strength | Time | War | Wisdom | Danger |
Myth is the software, the cultural DNA, the unconscious information, the meta-program that governs the way we see 'reality' and the way we behave. By providing a world picture and a set of stories that explains why things are as they are, [mythology] creates consensus, sanctifies the social order, and gives the individual an authorized map of the path of life. A myth creates the plotline that organizes the diverse experiences of a person or a community into a single story.
Individual | Life | Life | Myth | Order | Reality | Story | Wisdom | World |
If a man builds a better mousetrap than his neighbor, the world will not only beat a path to his door, it will make newsreels of him and his wife in beach pajamas, it will discuss his diet and his health, it will publish heart-throb stories of his love life.
Better | Diet | Health | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Man | Wife | Will | Wisdom | World |
Ignazio Silone , original name Secondo Transqulli
Destiny is an invention of the cowardly and the resigned.