This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered, than for what they have achieved.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue.
Lying | Right | Temptation | Will | Temptation |
Your afflictions are not eternal, time will end them, and so shall ye at length see the Lord’s salvation; His love sleepeth not, is still in working for you; His salvation will not tarry nor linger; and suffering for Him is the noblest cross out of heaven. Your Lord hath the choice of ten thousand other crosses, beside this, to exercise you withal; but His wisdom and His love choosed out this for you, beside them all; and take it as a choice one, and make use of it. Let the Lord absolutely have the ordering of your evils and troubles, and put them off you, by recommending your cross and your furnace to Him, who hath skill to melt His own metal, and knoweth well what to do with His furnace.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
Detachment | Lying | Pain | Present |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The people of former times... they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down. But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
In victory one does not understand the horror of war. It is only in the cold chill of defeat that it is brought home to you.
Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.
Lying | Opportunity |
There is no gene for such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. […] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.
Comfort | Discovery | Lying | Nature | Waiting | World | Discovery |
We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a transitional object—a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom.
Lying | Opportunity | World |
He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.
Better | Inclination | Lying | People |
To express unafraid and unashamed what one really thinks and feels is one of the great consolations of life.
Individual | Lying | Means | Sense | Unique |
Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
If anyone thinks that Jews can steal into the land of their fathers, he is deceiving either himself or others. Nowhere is the coming of Jews so promptly noted as in the historic home of the Jews, for the very reason that it is the historic home.
Lying |
All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven.