This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are on the brink of a historic convergence as novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers move toward multiform stories and digital formats; computer scientists move toward the creation of fictional worlds; and the audience moves toward the virtual stage. How can we tell what is coming next? Judging from the current landscape, we can expect a continued loosening of the traditional boundaries between games and stories, between films and rides, between broadcast media (like television and radio) and archival media (like books or videotape, between narrative forms (like books) and dramatic forms (like theater or film), and even between the audience and the author. To understand the new genres and the narrative pleasures that will arise from this heady mixture, we must look beyond the formats imposed upon the computer by the older media it is so rapidly assimilating and identify those properties native to the machine itself.
Books | Computer | Television | Will | Understand |
Since everything that comes into the human minds enters through the gates of sense, man’s first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own; it teaches us to believe much and know little.
Books | Experience | Intelligence | Little | Man | Philosophy | Reason | Sense | Teach |
A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained. Some governments are deficient in both these qualities; most governments are deficient in the first.
Fidelity | Good | Government | Knowledge | Means | Object | People | Qualities | Government | Happiness |
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley
Insist on reading the great books, on marking the great events of the world. Then the little books can take care of themselves, and the trivial incidents of passing politics and diplomacy may perish with the using.
Books | Care | Diplomacy | Events | Little | Politics | Reading | World |
You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
To the man who studies to gain a thorough insight into science, books and study are merely the steps of the ladder by which he climbs to the summit; as soon as a step has been advanced he leaves it behind. The majority of mankind, however, who study to fill their memory with facts do not use the steps of the ladder to mount upward, but take them off and lay them on their shoulders in order that they may take them along, delighting in the weight of the burden they are carrying. They ever remain below because they carry what should carry them.
Books | Insight | Majority | Man | Mankind | Memory | Order | Science | Study |
Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre, Count of Södermöre
The quality of books in a library is often a cloud of witnesses of the ignorance of the owner.
Nothing is more common than good things; the only question is how to discern them; it is certain that all of them are natural and within our reach and even known by every one. But we do not know how to distinguish them. This is universal. It is not in things extraordinary and strange that excellence of any kind is found. We reach up for it, and we are further away; more often than not we must stoop. The best books are those whose readers think they; could have written them. Nature, which alone is good, is familiar and common throughout.
Books | Distinguish | Excellence | Good | Nature | Nothing | Question | Excellence | Think |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
There is a constant relation between the state of the universe at any instant and the rate of change in the rate at which any part of the universe is changing at that instant, and this relation is man-one, i.e., such that the rate of change in the rate of change is determinate when the state of the universe I given. If the ‘law of causality’ is to be something actually discoverable in the practice of science, the above proposition has a better right to the name than any ‘law of causality’ to be found in the books of philosophers.
Better | Books | Change | Law | Man | Practice | Right | Science | Universe |
He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are
A book can give greater riches than any; other form of recreation but it cannot provide the last answers. They must be found in the loneliness of a man's own mind. Books can help a man be ready for those moments. But neither books nor teachers can provide the answers.
Books | Loneliness | Man | Mind | Recreation | Riches | Riches |
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
Chastity | Discretion | Fidelity | Instinct | Nobility | Skepticism | Surrender | Youth |
Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities.
Capacity | Conscience | Fidelity | Qualities | Success |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
Books | Children | Excitement | Family | Knowledge | Love | Man | Means | Mind | Reading | Right | Wrong | Learn |