This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is the type of man who has great contempt for "imÂmediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withÂdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueÂness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and manÂkind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life suck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.
Character | Creativity | Death | Defense | Defiance | Dread | Failure | Insanity | Life | Life | Looks | Means | Men | Misfortune | Nature | Parents | People | Price | Reality | Sense | Style | Tragedy | Will | Wonder | World | Misfortune | Failure |
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
Alas! It is well written, "The road to eminence lies through the cheap and exceedingly uninviting eating-houses."
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
Grace |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together
Style |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Now I have done what I can, he thought. Let him begin to circle and let the fight come.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Take a good rest, small bird, he said. Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.
Style |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. Yes. It's sort of what we have instead of God.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. IÂ’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobodyÂ’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless IÂ’m crazy or I keep getting better.
Imagination | Style | Think |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
We have indeed labored to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce – a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. – but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognize it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
An expansion of man's ability to bring forth secondary products is useless unless preceded by an expansion of his ability to win primary products from the earth; for man is not a producer but only a converter, and for every job of conversion he needs primary products.
Effort | Existence | Experience | Simplicity | Technology |
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
The present is the only thing with no end.
Experience | Harmony | Life | Life | Unique |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.
Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
All the indications are that the present structure of large-scale industrial enterprise, in spite of heavy taxation and an endless proliferation of legislation, is not conducive to the public welfare.
Experience | History | Mind |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
We may now give the following more precise expression to our chief law of biogeny:— The evolution of the foetus (or ontogenesis) is a condensed and abbreviated recapitulation of the evolution of the stem (orphylogenesis); and this recapitulation is the more complete in proportion as the original development (orpalingenesis) is preserved by a constant heredity; on the other hand, it becomes less complete in proportion as a varying adaptation to new conditions increases the disturbing factors in the development (or cenogenesis).