This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.
Imagination | Men | People |
Alas! sir, In what have I offended you? What cause Hath my behaviour given to your displeasure? The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Queen Katharine at II, iv)
Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits? MALVOLIO: Fool, there was never a man so notoriously abused. I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art. FESTE: But as well? Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool. Twelfth Night, Act iv, Scene 2
And now this pale swan in her watery nest begins the sad dirge of her certain ending.
Another lean unwashed artificer cuts off his tale and talks of Arthur's death. The Life and Death of King John (Hubert at IV, ii)
And as the butcher takes away the calf and binds the wretch and beats it when it strains, bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse, even so remorseless have they borne him hence; and as the dam runs lowing up and down, looking the way her harmless young one went, and can do naught but wail her darling's loss, even so myself bewails good Gloucester's case with said unhelpful tears, and with dimmed eyes Look after him and cannot do him good, So mighty are his vowed enemies. His fortunes I will weep, and 'twixt each groan Say 'Who's a traitor? Gloucester he is none.' King Henry VI, Part II, Act iii
Imagination | Nothing |
Done to death by slanderous tongue was the Hero that here lies. Much Ado about Nothing. Act v. Sc. 3.
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
What’s so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it. The majority of people on this planet, they’re overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being.
Imagination | Reality |
Charles F. Kettering, fully Charles Franklin Kettering
The Wright Brothers flew right through the smokescreen of impossibility.
Hope | Imagination |
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do.
Abstract | Common Sense | Difficulty | Discussion | Duty | Imagination | Pacifism | Rationality | Reason | Sense | Utopia | Think |
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Punishment | Society | Society |
There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share.
Art | Chance | Circumstances | Degeneracy | Discovery | History | Imagination | Important | Improvement | Literature | Observation | Past | Philosophy | Practice | Superstition | Will | Discovery | Art |
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
Day | Happy | Imagination | Man | People |
A pattern is either right or wrong.... It is no stronger than its weakest point.