This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Confidence | Genius | Knowledge | Maxims | Neglect | Nothing | Will |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
Good manners, which give color to life, are of greater importance than laws, which are but one of their manifestations. The law touches us here and there, but manners are about us everywhere.
Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |
If I choose to impose individual blame for all past social ills, there will be no one left to like in some of the most fascinating periods of our history. For example […] if I place every Victorian anti-Semite beyond the pale of my attention, my compass of available music and literature will be pitifully small. Though I hold no shred of sympathy for active persecution, I cannot excoriate individuals who acquiesced passively in a standard societal judgment. Rail instead against the judgment, and try to understand what motivates men of decent will.
All creatures ignorant of their own natures, could not universally in the whole kind, and in every climate and country, without any difference in the whole world, tend to a certain end, if some overruling wisdom did not preside over the world and guide them: and if the creatures have a Conductor, they have a Creator; all things are “turned round about by his counsel, that they may do whatsoever he commands them, upon the face of the world in the earth.” So that in this respect the folly of atheism appears. Without the owning a God, no account can be given of those actions of creatures, that are an imitation of reason.
If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.... We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
Genius |
Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will.
Ambition | Avarice | Duty | Existence | Faith | Genius | God | Mankind | Men | Misfortune | Opinion | People | Possessions | Rights | Teach | Toleration | Will | Misfortune | Ambition | Following | God |
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. It behooves him, too, in his own case, to give no example of concession, betraying the common right of independent opinion, by answering questions of faith, which the laws have left between God and himself.
Birth | Education | Genius | Nature | Public | Regard | Rights | Sacred | Happiness |
Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religiosu wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?
Action | Error | Genius | God | Habit | Ideas | Life | Life | Light | Study | Talent | God | Think |