This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Monfleury is on sale, I lose fifty thousand francs, if necessary, but I'm happy, I leave this hell of hypocrisy and harassment. I seek solitude and peace at only country where they exist in France, a fourth floor overlooking the Champs-Élysées.
When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of popular writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as conjecture and refutation.
Need | Nothing | Observation | Soul | Wise | Wit | Words | Brevity | Old |
There are none of his people so despicable in the eye of man, but they are known and regarded by God; though they are clouded in the world, yet they are the stars of the world; and shall God number the inanimate stars in the heavens, and make no account of his living stars on the earth? No, wherever they are dispersed, he will not forget them; however they are afflicted, he will not despise them; the stars are so numerous, that they are innumerable by man; some are visible and known by men; others lie more hid and undiscovered in a confused light, as those in the Milky Way; man cannot see one of them distinctly. God knows all his people. As he can do what is above the power of man to perform, so he understands what is above the skill of man to discover; shall man measure God by his scantiness? Proud man must not equal himself to God, nor cut God as short as his own line. He tells the number of the stars, and calls them all by their names. He hath them all in his list, as generals the names of their soldiers in their muster-roll, for they are his host, which he marshals in the heavens (as Isa. xi. 26, where you have the like expression); he knows them more distinctly than man can know anything, and so distinctly as to call “them all by their names.”
Conscience | God | Joy | Man | Peace | Torture | Wit | God | Understand |
All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. humility gives it its power. if you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. if you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them.
Courtesy | Education | Giving | Good | Intelligence | Life | Life | Love | People | Proficiency | Purpose | Purpose | Reflection | Smile | Time | Wit | Think | Value |
When I say I believe in a square deal i do not mean ... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man, or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.
Courage | Destiny | Lesson | Necessity | Will | Wit | World |
For the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the like.
A lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.
Contempt | Power | Wit | Understand |
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
Ballade of Dead Actors - Where are the passions they essayed, And where the tears they made to flow? Where the wild humours they portrayed For laughing worlds to see and know? Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe? Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall? And Millamant and Romeo? Into the night go one and all. Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed? The plumes, the armours -- friend and foe? The cloth of gold, the rare brocade, The mantles glittering to and fro? The pomp, the pride, the royal show? The cries of war and festival? The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow? Into the night go one and all. The curtain falls, the play is played: The Beggar packs beside the Beau; The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid; The Thunder huddles with the Snow. Where are the revellers high and low? The clashing swords? The lover's call? The dancers gleaming row on row? Into the night go one and all.
Age | Chance | Duty | Fear | Gold | Need | Politics | Time | War | Wit |
Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
Wit |
How rev'rend is the face of this tall pile, whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, to bear aloft its arch'd and pond'rous roof! By its own weight made steadfast and immovable. Looking tranquillity! It strikes an awe and terror to my aching sight! The tombs and monumental caves of death look cold, and shoot a chillness to my trembling heart.
A fretful temper will divide the closest knot that may be tied, by ceaseless sharp corrosion a temper passionate and fierce may suddenly your joys disperse at one immense explosion.
How fleet is a glance of the mind compared with the speed of its flight, the tempest itself lags behind, and the swift-winged arrows of light.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.
Wit |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind’s eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhaps, both so respectably booted and furred that their dressing in the afternoon must be a ritual, and the clothes themselves put away in cupboards with camphor, year after year, throughout the summer months. They cross the road when the lamps are being lit (for the dusk is their favorite hour), as they must have done year after year. The elder is close on eighty; but if one asked her what her life has meant to her, she would say that she remembered the streets lit for the battle of Balaclava, or had heard the guns fire in Hyde Park for the birth of King Edward the Seventh. And if one asked her, longing to pin down the moment with date and season, but what were you doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875, she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and cups washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the world. Nothing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it. And the novels, without meaning to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were present; and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo, and the rings embedded in their fat swollen fingers, talking with a gesticulation like the swing of Shakespeare’s words; or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways; or from drifting girls whose faces, like waves in sun and cloud, signal the coming of men and women and the flickering lights of shop windows. All that you will have to explore, I said to Mary Carmichael, holding your torch firm in your hand.
Good | Nothing | Speech | Spirit | Thought | Will | Wit | Think | Thought |
Earnest people are often people who habitually look at the serious side of things that have no serious side.