This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Without doubt it is natural to include that love long what we love so much.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility.
Cause | Ideas | Knowing | Man | Nature | Need | Organization | Purpose | Purpose | Sense |
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trial of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find and excuse for going on!
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Conversation | Hurry | Prayer | Sense | Work |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.
Common Sense | Sense | Think |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.
Despair | Individual | Land | Man | People | Sense | Will | Woman |
Those who have searched into human nature observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul, as that its felicity consists in action. Every man has such an active principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon, in whatever place or state of life he is posted.
Conversation | Discretion | Giving | Good | Love | Man | Nothing | Sense |
May he die with no joy at his end, The man who won't be troubled To unlock the keys of his heart and make a friend.
Sense |
Far away, I was with you when your father entered in the shadows and left you his farewell.
Sense |
We have descended into the garden and caught 300 slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.
Acceptance | Prayer | Sense |