This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whatever life is (and nobody can define it) it is something forever changing shape, fleeting, escaping us into death. Life is indeed the only thing that can die, and it begins to die as soon as it is born, and never ceases dying. Each of us is constantly experiencing cellular death. For the renewal of our tissues means a corresponding death of them, so that death and rebirth become, biologically, right and left hand of the same thing. All growing is at the same time a dying away from that which lived yesterday.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One finds in art the means whereby he may rejoice in his nature, another the means whereby he may temporarily overcome and escape from his nature. In accordance with these two needs, there are two kinds of art and artist.
Man was born to be tested on this earth... If I am to live twenty more years, I will try to live enjoying each moment, instead of killing myself to get more... to be a man means to be responsible, to know when it is time to speak, to know what has to be said, to know when one must stay silent.
Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To grow worse; the best means to grow better is to be the worst there.
Better | Choice | Means | Pleasure | Society | Wisdom | Society |
Russell Schweikart, fully Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart aka Schweikart
[The earth] is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in that universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love.
Art | Birth | Death | Earth | History | Little | Love | Means | Music | Poetry | Universe | Wisdom | Art |
Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
No international Eighteenth Amendment will get rid of war or the instruments of war until civilization finds a way for accomplishing what war has done in the past. Simply to prohibit war is not going to get rid of it. Wars must be anticipated and the causes got rid of by a readiness to accept peaceful means of settlement.
Man has other enemies more formidable, against which he is not provided with such means of defense: these are the natural infirmities of infancy, old age, and illness of every kind, melancholy proofs of our weakness, of which the two first are common to all animals, and the last belongs chiefly to man in a; state of society.
Age | Defense | Infancy | Man | Means | Melancholy | Old age | Society | Weakness | Wisdom | Old |
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
Religion... sex... race... money... avoidance rites... malnutrition... dreams - no part of these can be looked at and clearly seen without looking at the whole of them. For, as a painter mixes colors and makes of them new colors, so religion is turned into something different by race, and segregation is colored as much by sex as by skin pigment, and money is no longer a coin but a lost wish wandering through a man’s whole life.
Dreams | Life | Life | Man | Money | Race | Religion | Rites | Wisdom |
I once gave a lady two-and-twenty receipts against melancholy; one was a bright fire; another, to remember all the pleasant things said to her; another, to keep a box of sugarplums on the chimney-piece and a kettle simmering on the hob. I thought this mere trifling at the moment, but have in after life discovered how true it is that these little pleasures often banish melancholy better than higher and more exalted objects; and that no means ought to be thought too trifling which can oppose it either in ourselves or in others.
Better | Life | Life | Little | Means | Melancholy | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |