This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
O, let her brother live: Thieves for the robbery have authority When judges steal themselves. Measure for Measure (Angelo at II, ii)
Please you, I'll tell you as we pass along, That you will wonder what hath fortuned. Come, Proteus, 'tis your penance but to hear The story of your loves discovered; That done, our day of marriage shall be yours: One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.
A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. - They create an ideal character the perfections of which compensate in some degree for imperfections of their own.
Immortality | Instinct | Life | Life | Words |
Nothing yet proves that continued progress is inevitable, but that it is possible no one but an extreme skeptic or pessimist can doubt.
Bible | Example | Intelligence | Life | Life | Reflection | Rest | Revelation | Security | Words | Bible |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
Let a woman be correct in manner and upright in character in order to serve her husband. Let her live in purity and quietness of spirit, and attend to her own affairs. Let her love not gossip and silly laughter. Let her cleanse and purify and arrange in order the wine and the food for the offerings to the ancestors. When a woman observes such principles as these, then she may be said to continue ancestral worship.
Contempt | Harmony | Husband | Love | Rebuke | Relationship | Wife | Words |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
As Yin and Yang are not of the same nature, so man and woman have different characteristics. The distinctive quality of the Yang is rigidity; the function of the Yin is yielding. Man is honored for strength; a woman is beautiful on account of her gentleness. Hence there arose the common saying: "A man though born like a wolf may, it is feared, become a weak monstrosity; a woman though born like a mouse may, it is feared, become a tiger."
Appearance | Need | Virtue | Virtue | Woman | Words | Work |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
To guard carefully her chastity; to control circumspectly her behavior; in every motion to exhibit modesty; and to model each act on the best usage, this is womanly virtue.
Words |
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
God does not rule the world outwardly by gravitation and chemical affinity, but inwardly in the heart of man: as is your soul, so will the destiny be of the world in which you live and do.
What you are doing does not matter so much as what you are learning from doing it.
Words |
When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.
You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.
Our worth is determined by the good deeds we do, rather than by the fine emotions we feel.
When you see a hand from afar, Kimya, can you do that there is only one school. But you dive into the water, you realize that there is more than a river. The river is hidden inside various currents and they all run in harmony, yet are completely separate from one another.
Belief | Books | Destroy | Force | God | Good | Insanity | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Need | People | Philosophy | Religion | Taste | Time | Words | God | Understand |
It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.
The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.