This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal.
Family | Nothing | Responsibility |
Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.
Difficulty | Family |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
How then does soul differ from spirit?’ You’re probably asking yourself, although he must have been reasonably sure nobody was. Well, soul is darker of color, denser of volume, saltier of flavor, rougher of texture, and tends to be more maternalistic than paternalistic: soul is connected to Mother Earth, just as spirit is connected to Father Sky.
Think |
A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.
Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.
Better | Conduct | Consideration | Family | Father | Improvement | Justice | Justify | Life | Life | Lying | Magic | Man | Sense | Truth | Understanding | Will | Work | Worth | Vice |
O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)
Conscience | Cunning | Defeat | Devil | Father | Force | Gall | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Murder | Oppression | Passion | Play | Power | Property | Revenge | Soul | Spirit | Tears | Weakness | Will | Words | Murder | Guilty |
The worst effect of sin is within, and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.
Consciousness | Defeat | Faith | Hope |
Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.
Your castle of earth and stone may be beautiful, but unless you dwell in the fortress of the unchanging, you must depart and leave it behind. So keep to the fortress of the unchanging!
I am happy that in an age of technology there are those who are giving modern interpretation to the dream world which contains the key to the development of the evolution of the race. The dream world, and the world of deep feeling which is interpreted by symbols, relate to us the ancient races, for the dreams of ancient man and modern man are given in the same symbolic language.
I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have -- women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who've worked all their lives for half wages or no pay.
Family | Future | Government | Men | Government |
Our message is clear. We count. Children count. Everybody counts, so count everybody,
Better | Equality | Example | Family | Organization |
Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.
Honey, I'm Brazilian south. I can spend ten years with broken because of a woman I have not even kissed heart.
My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet.
He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.
Family | Happy | Relationship |