This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding, ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure, ye noted it not mid your hope and your pleasure; there was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding, but daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.
Beauty | Desire | Humanity | Life | Life | Man | Men | Sense | Beauty |
A man convinced of his own merit will accept misfortune as an honor, for thus can he persuade others, as well as himself, that he is a worthy target for the arrows of fate.
Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.
A shrewd man has to arrange his interests in order of importance and deal with them one by one; but often our greed upsets this order and makes us run after so many things at once that through over-anxiety to obtain the trivial, we miss the most important.
Civility is but a desire to receive civility, and to be esteemed polite.
Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.
Desire |
The happiness and unhappiness of men depend as much on their turn of mind as on fortune.
Desire |
We easily forget our faults when they are known only to ourselves.
Desire |
The excessive pleasure we feel in talking of ourselves, ought to make us apprehensive that we afford little to our hearers.
Desire |
There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.
Desire |
We should wish for few things with eagerness, if we perfectly knew the nature of that which was the object of our desire.
Desire |
The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.
Desire |
There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other.
O my love, my wife! Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have, moreover, a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our own creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power, and I apprehend that this is the proper sense of the word, if imagination be the power which gives birth to the productions of the poet and the painter. The operations of imagination are by no means confined to the materials which conception furnishes, but may be equally employed about all the subjects of our knowledge.
When we enlarge upon the affection our friends have for us, this is very often not so much out of a sense of gratitude as from a desire to persuade people of our own great worth, that can deserve so much kindness.
Desire |
O, but they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listened more than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose. More are men's ends marked than their lives before. The setting sun, and music at the close, as the last taste of sweets, is… Richard II, Act ii, Scene 1
Earth |
Were we to take as much pains to be what we ought to be as we do to disguise what we really are, we might appear like ourselves without being at the trouble of any disguise at all.
Desire |
Who lives without any madness, it is not so wise as he thinks.
Accident | Better | Desire | Fear | Reconciliation |