This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.
Civilization | Fear |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The hope is that more dupes skill.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The hatred of the weak is not so dangerous that their friendship.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
Better | Change | Distrust | Heart | Man | Nations | Reason | Thought | Trust | War | Will | World | Afraid | Child | Thought |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.
Heaven | Personality |
If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.
You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it.
Evil | God | Good | Love | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Revenge | Sin | Temper | Vengeance | Work | God |
April O fair mid-spring, besung so oft and oft, How can I praise thy loveliness enow? Thy sun that burns not, and thy breezes soft That o'er the blossoms of the orchard blow, The thousand things that 'neath the young leaves grow, The hopes and chances of the growing year, Winter forgotten long, and summer near. When summer brings the lily and the rose, She brings us fear-her very death she brings Hid in her anxious heart, the forge of woes; And, dull with fear, no more the mavis sings. But thou! thou diest not, but thy fresh life clings About the fainting autumn's sweet decay, When in the earth the hopeful seed they lay. Ah! life of all the year, why yet do I, Amid thy snowy blossoms' fragrant drift, Still long for that which never draweth nigh, Striving my pleasure from my pain to sift, Some weight from off my fluttering mirth to lift? - Now, when far bells are ringing Come again, Come back, past years! why will ye pass in vain?
If we would not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could not harm us.
Love |
If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us.
Love |
When our vices quit us, we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them.
The road to truth is the effort of the heart, not the mind.
Abstinence | Fanaticism | Heart | Rest |
Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic.
Existence | Forgiveness | Happy | Light | Soul | Will | Forgiveness |
You were wrong to count on me. Who can speak in terms? God and the Failure.
Man |
What a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people's cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
So he'll never know how much love: not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself, than I own. I do not know that our souls are made, but they are equal, and Linton is as different from mine as a moonbeam is different from lightning, fire or ice.
Cause | Danger | Distinction | Enough | Existence | Fear | Heart | Life | Life | Regard | Sincerity | Danger | Trouble | Think |