This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I would rather see words out on their own, away from their families and the warehouse of Roget wandering the world where they sometimes fall in love with a completely different word.
My soul is sick with every day's report of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
The earth was made so various, that the mind of desultory man, studious of change, and pleased with novelty, might be indulged.
Let her pass, and charioted along in guilty splendor, shake the public ways!
Solitude, seeming a sanctuary, proves a grave; a sepulchre in which the living lie, where all good qualities grow sick and die.
Love | Taste | Friendship |
Men engage in it compell'd by force, and fear, not courage, is its proper source, the fear of tyrant custom, and the fear lest fops should censure us, and fools should sneer… am I to set my life upon a throw because a bear is rude and surly? A moral, sensible, and well-bred man will not affront me, and no other can.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we are at no loss to perceive that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
And, when the votes are counted, let everybody, including the candidates, get into a good humor as quick as they got into a bad one.
Children |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
Every man, however good he may be, has a yet better man dwelling in him, which is properly himself, but to whom nevertheless he is often unfaithful. It is to this interior and less mutable being that we should attach ourselves, not to be changeable, every-day man.
Children |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Congress is so strange; a man gets up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees.
Children | Good | Government | Inheritance | Money | Government | Think |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Now I am not a sort of a lawyer detecting things, but that name sounds a little phoney. When one man writes all that's in a paper, and this only had three pages outside of legal notices, why naturally he has got to make it look like he had quite a staff, so he does like these big holding companies did when they was sending wires to help them keep on holding, why they signed any name they could think of. Now there ain't no man named 0. Z. Ide. He is as synthetic as the article.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.
Character | Children | Circumstances | Day | Ego | Husband | Life | Life | Mind | Necessity | Time |
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
Children | Riches | Riches | Understand |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Children |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
You see, all these laws that they are having so much trouble wondering if they are constitutional, they were all drawn up by lawyers. For almost two-thirds of the membership of the House and Senate are lawyers.
Credit | Harmony | Little | Means | Taste | Thought | Time | Old | Think | Thought |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.