This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My father, indeed, was a very humble man, but in consequence of his unaffected piety and stainless integrity of principle, he was held in high esteem by all who know him, no matter what their rank might be. When the state of education in Ireland during his youth and that of my mother is considered, it will not be a matter of surprise that what education they did receive was very limited. It would be difficult, however, if not impossible, to find two persons in their lowly station so highly and singularly gifted. My father possessed a memory not merely great or surprising, but absolutely astonishing. Ile would repeat nearly the whole of the Old and New Testaments by heart, and was besides a living index to almost every chapter and verse in them. In all other respects, too, his memory was amazing. My native place is a spot rife with old legends, tales, traditions, customs, and superstitions; so that in my early youth, even beyond the walls of my own humble roof, they met me in every direction. It was at home, however, and from my father’s lips in particular, that they were perpetually sounding in my ears In fact, his memory was a perfect storehouse, and a rich one, of all that the social antiquary, the man of the letters, the poet, or the musicians, would consider valuable. As a teller of old tales, legends and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and his stock of them was inexhaustible. He spoke the Irish and English languages with nearly equal fluency. With all kinds of charms, old ranns, or poems, old prophecies, religious superstitions, tales of pilgrimages, anecdotes of blessed priests and friars, revelations form ghosts and fairies was he thoroughly acquainted. And so strongly were all these impressed upon my mind by frequent repetition on his part, that I have hardly every since heard, during a tolerably enlarged intercourse with Irish society, both educated and uneducated - with the antiquary, the scholar, or the humble seanachie - any single tradition, legend, or usages, that, so far as I can at present recollect, was perfectly new to me or unheard before in some similar cognate dress. This is certainly saying much, but I believe I may assert with confidence that I could produce, in attestation of its truth, the names of Petrie, Sir William Betham, Ferguson, and Donovan, the most distinguished antiquaries, both of social usages an otherwise, that every Ireland produced. What rendered this besides of such peculiar advantage to me in after life, as a literary man, was that I heard them as often in the Irish language as in the English, if not oftener, a circumstance which enabled me in my writings to transfer the genius, the idiomatic peculiarity and conversational spirit of the one language into the other, precisely as the people themselves do in their dialogue, whenever the heart or imagination happens to be moved by the darker or the better passions.
It was one evening at the close of a September month and a September day that two equestrians might be observed passing along one of those old and lonely Irish roads that seemed, from the nature of its construction, to have been paved by a society of antiquarians, if a person could judge from its obsolete character, and the difficulty, without risk of neck or limb, of riding a horse or driving a carriage along it. Ireland, as our English readers ought to know, has always been a country teeming with abundance - a happy land, in which want, destitution, sickness, and famine have never been felt or known, except through the mendacious misrepresentations of her enemies. The road we speak of was a proof of this; for it was evident to every observer that, in some season of superabundant food, the people, not knowing exactly how to dispose of their shilling loaves, took to paving the common roads with them, rather than they should be utterly useless. These loaves, in the course of time, underwent the process of petrifaction, but could not, nevertheless, be looked upon as wholly lost to the country. A great number of the Irish, within six of the last preceding years - that is, from ’46 to ’ 52 - took a peculiar fancy for them as food, which, we presume, caused their enemies to say that we then had hard times in Ireland. Be this as it may, it enabled the sagacious epicures who lived upon them to retire, in due course, to the delightful retreats of Skull and Skibbereen, and similar asylums, there to pass the very short remainder of their lives in health, ease, and luxury.
Character | Government | Liberty | Man | Neglect | Present | Public | Story | Thinking | Truth | Government |
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
The sensual and spiritual are linked together by a mysterious bond, sensed by our emotions, though hidden from our eyes. To this double nature of the visible and invisible world / to the profound longing for the latter, coupled with the feeling of the sweet necessity for the former, we owe all sound and logical systems of philosophy, truly based on the immutable principles of our nature, just as from the same source arise the most senseless enthusiasms.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Now these fellows in Washington wouldn't be so serious and particular if they only had to vote on what they thought was good for the majority of the people in the U.S. That would be a cinch. But what makes it hard for them is every time a bill comes up they have things to decide that have nothing to do with the merit of the bill. The principal thing is of course: What will this do for me personally back home?
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 |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
We can, for instance, predict the probability for finding the electron at a later time at a given point in the cloud chamber. It should be emphasized, however, that the probability function does not in itself represent a course of events in the course of time. It represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events.
Cause | Character | Experiment | Influence | Law | Need | Observation | Position | System | Universe | World |
Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.
Capacity | Character | Experience | Health | Surrender |
It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.
Abnormal | Character | Fear | Life | Life | Love | Mortal | Sense | Simplicity | Terror | Talent | Understand |
The character-armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature. The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in material but in spiritual things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature. Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the age of the atom bomb.
Only too often do we thoughtlessly follow a fashion which favors mass produced commodities, and only slowly do we come to realize that these also have great disadvantages.
Character | Competition | Harmony | Important | Order | Principles | Society | Society |
The fact that political ideologies are tangible, active realities does not prove their necessity. The bubonic plague was an extremely potent social reality. But nobody would have argued that, because it existed, it was necessary and nothing should be done about it.
Behavior | Character | Cleanliness | Energy | Enthusiasm | Force | Politics | Will | Work |
The emotional plague is not an expression of conscious ill will or designed brutality. The structural character of the plague made its effects the more dangerous. Emotional plague is a character trait like cleanliness or deligence or truthfulness. It is biopathic behavior lived out on the social scene in interhuman relationships. The energy source of the emotional plague reactions is basically sexual frustration combined with a keen aggressiveness. - View Quote Details on The emotional plague is not an expression of conscious ill… Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.
Capitalism | Character | Individual |
The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom. Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature — in the good sense of the word — will he create genuine culture.
Age | Body | Character | Civilization | Machines | Order | Philosophy | Power | Problems | Thinking | Time | Think | Understand |
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
You take a firm grip on positive attitudes of thought. You hold right thoughts in your mind just as your hand grips a golf club. You keep both feet on the ground. You stand for the highest and the best and strive to fill your life with the goodness of God.
The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.
Character | Existence | Relationship | World |
Walter Anderson, fully Walter Truett Anderson
I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.
Character | Inevitable | Life | Life | Pain |