This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pellerin read every work on ‘sthetics, in order to find out the true theory of the Beautiful, convinced that, when he had discovered it, he would produce masterpieces. He surrounded himself with every imaginable auxiliary?drawings, plaster-casts, models, engravings; and he kept searching about, eating his heart out.
So far as Emma was pertaining concerned About did not she ask herself Whether she was in love. Love, she thought, was something That must come Suddenly, with a great display of thunder and lightning, descending on one's life like a tempest from above, turning it topsy-turvy, whirling away one's resolutions like leaves and bearing one onward, heart and soul: towards the abyss. She never bethought herself how on the terrace of a house forms the rain Itself into little lakes When the gutters are choked, and she was going on quite unaware of her peril, When all of a sudden she Discovered - a crack in the wall!
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She only cared for the sea when it was lashed to fury by the storm and for verdure when it served as a background to a ruin. Everything must needs minister to her personal longings, as it were, and she thrust aside as of no account whatever everything that did not immediately contribute to stir the emotions of her heart, for her temperament was sentimental rather than artistic, seeking, not pictures, but emotions.
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She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.
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The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of--I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters--I live and breathe them.
When you have nothing important or interesting to say, don't let anyone persuade you to say it.
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It is my observation that too many of us are spending money we haven't earned to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like.
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Follow the three R's: - Respect for self. - Respect for others. - Responsibility for all your actions. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
The 3 most powerful resources you have available to you: love, prayer and forgiveness.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Every contribution to human progress on record has been made by some individual who differed sharply from the general, and was thus, almost, superior to the general. Perhaps the palpably insane must be excepted here, but I can think of no others. Such exceptional individuals should be permitted, it seems to me, to enjoy every advantage that goes with their superiority... The rest are as negligible as the race of cockroaches, who have gone unchanged for a million years.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss of humanity.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism.
Kant... stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge... to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The scientific impulse seems to me to be the very opposite of the religious impulse. When a man seeks knowledge he is trying to gain means of fighting his own way in the world, but when he prays he confesses that he is unable to do so. .... The feeling of abasement, of incapacity, is inseparable from the religious impulse, but against that feeling all exact knowledge makes war. The efficient man does not cry out "Save me, O God". On the contrary, he makes diligent efforts to save himself. But suppose he fails? Doesn't he throw himself, in the end, on the mercy of the gods? Not at all. He accepts his fate with philosophy, buoyed up by the consciousness that he has done his best. Irreligion, in a word, teaches men how to die with dignity, just as it teaches them how to live with dignity.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Monogamy, in brief, kills passion -- and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man -- the ideal civilized man -- is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately -- when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it.
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