This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Very many maintain that all we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.
Books |
The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, He can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean.
Civilization | Disease | Fear | Poverty |
Persons that are well affected to religion, that receive instructions of piety with pleasure and satisfaction, often wonder how it comes to pass that they make no greater progress in that religion which they so much admire. Now the reason of it is this: it is because religion lives only in their head, but something else has possession of their heart; and therefore they continue from year to year mere admirers and praisers of piety, without ever coming up to the reality and perfection of its precepts.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river.
Books | Evolution | Life | Life | Little | Thought | Thought |
Preserving your health by too strict a diet is a tedious illness.
Health |
Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a worrisome malady.
Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.
Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.
It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.
Now, good my lord, Let there be some more test made of my mettle Before so noble and so great a figure Be stamped upon it.
Inclination is another word with which will is frequently confounded. Thus, when the apothecary says, in Romeo and Juliet,— “My poverty, but not my will, consents; Take this and drink it off; the work is done.†the word will is plainly used as synonymous with inclination; not in the strict logical sense, as the immediate antecedent of action. It is with the same latitude that the word is used in common conversation, when we think of doing a thing which duty prescribes, against one’s own will; or when we speak of doing a thing willingly or unwillingly.
Acquaintance | Attainment | Books | Correctness | Grace | Language | Lying | Men | Merit | Purity | Reading | Style | Taste | Writing |
O, let us have him, for his silver hairs will purchase us a good opinion, and buy men's voices to commend our deeds.
Books |
Our love was new, and then but in the spring, when I was wont to greet it with my lays, as Philomel in summer's front doth sing and stops her pipe in growth of riper days; not that the summer is less pleasant now than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, but that wild music burdens every bough, and sweets grown common lose their dear delight.