This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.
Care | Cultivation | Culture | Ideas | Meaning | Means | Sense | Understanding | Words | Worship |
We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my deep abhorrence if I caught anyone preferring Art To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart. I lived with crooks but seldom was molested; The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Care | Culture | Future | Good | Justice | Need | Plan | Teach | Will | World |
W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
I had this Melanesian belle, a comely looking lass, and I was headed for the shrubbery, which grows very lush in those parts. Well, her husband was following behind holding a forefinger up in the air and crying, 'One dollah, one dollah!'
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Chance | Civilization | Culture | Devotion | Humanity | Ignorance | Men | Will | World |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep. Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look - it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions - good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide - be a bore? Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in dowtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico. Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Age | Art | Beauty | Consciousness | Culture | Elegance | Evidence | Excitement | Failure | Family | Good | Hate | Health | Life | Life | Loneliness | Marriage | Past | People | Politics | Recreation | Reward | Science | Self | Talking | Time | Work | World | Failure | Loss | Art | Beauty |
My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.
Mother |
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
Death | Dreams | Fulfillment | Mother |
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes each year to disguise the clanking mechanism of machine within machine within machine.
Taste |
Soldier, there is a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches the moon together in his room to his virgilian cadences, up down, up down. It is a war that never ends.
One poem proves another and the whole, for the clairvoyant men that need no proof: the lover, the believer and the poet. Their words are chosen out of their desire, the joy of language, when it is themselves.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream - Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear, and let the boys bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be the finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet on which she embroidered fantails once and spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come to show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.