This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It was easier to keep myself from becoming a success as an actor. Critics were careful not to outrage my modesty by their praise, and the public scrupulously refused to debauch me with applause. I have thought about it a good deal, and my conclusion is that I was ahead of my time. Or behind it.
It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term layman to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and as sensitive as himself, an outsider.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.
Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.
If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?
Danger | History | Speculation | Danger | Trouble |
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.
Criticism | Indispensable | Mind |
In our wide world there is but one altogether fatal personage, the dunce,--he that speaks irrationally, that sees not, and yet thinks he sees.
I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home.
Books | Doctrine | Ignorance | Man | Materialism | Teach | Thought | Writing | Thought |
Though I shall for convenience often speak of two standpoints, the subjective and the objective, and though the various places in which this opposition is found have much in common, the distinction between more subjective and more objective views is really a matter of degree, and it covers a wide spectrum.
Appearance | Attention | Design | Doctrine | Evidence | Evolution | Force | Law | Life | Life | Nothing | Position | Present | Question | Reading | Skepticism | Think |
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know.
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Good will is not a single quality. It is a composite of all the qualities of the spirit, applied to daily living.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it they will want to come back and see you do it again and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having success in your life.
Blame |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
Will |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Beauty, midnight, vision dies: let the winds of dawn that blow softly round your dreaming head. Such a day of welcome show eye and knocking heart may bless, find our mortal world enough; noons of dryness find you fed by the involuntary powers, nights of insult let you pass watched by every human love.
Books |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH.
Books | Conspiracy | Literature | Nonsense | Nothing | Reading | Suspicion | Taste |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.
Literature | Posterity |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
People |