This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Truth, Sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
Attention | Learning | Literature | Mankind | Time |
Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL
Sometimes the conditioned soul is attracted by illusion personified (his wife or girl friend) and becomes eager to be embraced by a woman. Thus he loses his intelligence as well as knowledge of life’s goal. At that time, no longer attempting spiritual cultivation, he becomes overly attached to his wife or girlfriend…
Literature | Universe |
And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of the infection - that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.
Literature | Nothing |
In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.
Effort | Good | Literature | Psychology | Soul | Thought | Thought |
Alexander Fleming, fully Sir Alexander Fleming
It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance which affects different bacteria in different degrees. Generally speaking it may be said that the least sensitive bacteria are the Gram-negative bacilli, and the most susceptible are the pyogenic cocci ... In addition to its possible use in the treatment of bacterial infections penicillin is certainly useful... for its power of inhibiting unwanted microbes in bacterial cultures so that penicillin insensitive bacteria can readily be isolated.
Chance | Literature | Merit | Neglect | Observation | Study | Truth | Work |
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
Art | Enlightenment | Guidance | Literature | Science | Guidance | Art |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite.
Convictions | Literature | Time |
If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus... would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?
Blame | Example | Individual | Literature | Men | Music | Past | Sympathy | Will | Understand |
Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection... Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.
Ability | Intelligence | Invention | Literature | Little | Nature | Receive | Story | World |
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé
I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
Fun | Literature |
We may summarize the main line of this complexly meandering tale as a list of ironies - invoking the technical definition of irony as a statement where, for humorous or sarcastic effect, the intended meaning of a word becomes directly opposite to the usual sense...
Labor | Legends | Literature | Need | Thought | Thought | Understand |
In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves.
Experience | Impression | Literature | Poetry |
A dandy is a clothes-wearing man,-a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes.-Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object-the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
Force | Important | Literature |
The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.
Literature | Mind | Talent | Old |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Art | Enlightenment | Intolerance | Literature | Mankind | Passion | Reason | Rhetoric | Service | Slander | Virtue | Virtue | Slander | Art | Intellect |
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
Antiquity | Better | Character | Era | Famous | Improvement | Literature | Rank | Science | World | Circumstance |
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Dishonor | Human race | Literature | Man | Order | Peace | Race |
Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
We are living at a time when it is absolutely essential to make a clean cut distinction between the magical attitude and the religious attitude in life. We have today as men never dreamed of having in other days, coercive control over tremendous forces in the natural world. We make daily trial of these forces, we “tempt” them, and they obey. We press the button, and throw the switch, and spin the dial, and step on the accelerator and the gods of all mythology touch their caps in deferential obedience to our slightest whim. The applied sciences of the twentieth century do make magicians of us all. It should be said at once that the pure scientist stands absolutely free of the charge of practicing magic. The affinities of pure science are with religion, in that its reference is not from the universe to man’s uses, but from man to the realities of his universe. But the pure scientist is as rare a creature in our world as the pure saint. The vulgar modern heresy that society is made up of a large number of very pure scientists and an equally large number of very impure Christians is simply grotesque. Once in a while this world sees men like Saint Francis, John Woolman, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday; once in a great while. But the pure scientist is as much an exception in a university laboratory as the pure saint is an exception in a sectarian meeting house. For the most part we have at hand a society of persons practicing variously in the names of religion and science a self-willed, uncritical, and arrogant attempt to make the ultimate forces give them what they severally desire. And this temptation of the Lord their God is neither science nor religion in the noblest meaning of those words.
Challenge | Confidence | History | Literature | Magic | Man | Men | Power | Practice | Relationship | Religion | Research | Spirit | Universe | Wisdom | World |