This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
One cannot expect Miss Jones to revolutionize her outlook overnight. One has to provide her with a steady stream of material, which she can introduce into her existing syllabus as enrichment. In the course of years, she will enlarge her repertoire. All the time, the new material should be as close as possible to what she already knows. This is how revolutions are made; not by taking one big step, but by taking many little steps quickly, one after other.
Force | Joy | Mathematics | Pleasure | Question | Regret | Sense | Worry |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Regret |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.
Knowing | Regret | Understand |
Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated.
As yet, it must be owned, this daring expectation is but feebly reflected in our books. In looking over any collection of American poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America, Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion, Emerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions! There is no baptism of fire; no heat that breeds excess. Yet it is not life that is grown dull, surely; there are as many secrets in every heart, as many skeletons in every closet, as in any elder period of the world’s career. It is the interpreters of life who are found wanting, and that not on this soil alone, but throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not just to say, as someone has said, that our language has not in this generation produced a love-song, for it has produced Browning; but was it in England or in Italy that he learned to sound the depths of all human emotion?
Absence | Consciousness | Culture | Impulse | Man | Regret | Strength |
Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell.
Change | Contentment | Daughter | Day | Life | Life | Light | Looks | Mind | Nothing | People | Power | Regret | Safe | Time | Will | Wonder | Wrong | Think |
Work means so many things! So many! Among other things, work also means freedom... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception.
I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise.
Absence | Children | Desire | Enough | People | Reason | Regret | Thinking | Witness | Think |
Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
I shall desire you all, my lords, (chiefly you of the nobility, everyone in his degree and power) to be assistant to me that I, with my ruling, and you with your service, may make a good account to Almighty God and leave some comfort to our posterity on earth.
Regret | Unhappiness |
The people often slandered as greedy geezers seem to have a perspective from their place in history. The elders in my family remember the Depression. The baby boomers remember dot-com boom and bust. We all have albums of best laid plans.
Each time I think of the essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.
Indifference | Regret | Universe | Will |
Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. With "smart" technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says that "people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless," he is not wrong: This is the future we're headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there. A more humane smart-design paradigm would happily acknowledge that the task of technology is not to liberate us from problem-solving. Rather, we need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving. What we want is not a life where friction and frustrations have been carefully designed out, but a life where we can overcome the frictions and frustrations that stand in our way. Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Unless designers of smart technologies take stock of the complexity and richness of the lived human experience—with its gaps, challenges and conflicts—their inventions will be destined for the SmartBin of history.
Achievement | Balance | Behavior | Better | Failure | People | Regret | Right | Shame | Space | Failure | Trial | Happiness |