This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Achievement | Change | Guilt | Opportunity | Optimism | Reason | Suffering | Tragedy |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.
Capacity | Competition | Good | Guilt | Joy | Will | Work | Child |
Sincerity is no test of truth - no evidence of correctness of conduct. - You may take poison sincerely believing it the needed medicine, but will it save your life?
Guilt | Responsibility |
A name unmusical to the Volscians' ears, And harsh in sound to thine. -Coriolanus. Act iv. Sc. 5.
O our lives' sweetness, That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once!
How to deal with the goodness of their loved ones? Could be fought against goodness?
Chastity | Earth | Giving | Good | Guilt | Impression | Responsibility | Self | Truth | Wrong |
So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
Business | Cause | Day | Death | Duty | Father | God | Greatness | Guilt | Law | Life | Life | Man | Men | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Sin | Soul | Teach | Time | War | Business | God | Guilty | Think |
Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion! Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.
But we can also see at once that there is no line between normal and neurotic, as we all lie and are all bound in some ways by the lies. Neurosis is, then, something we all share; it is universal.4 Or, putting it another way, normality is neurosis, and vice versa. We call a man "neurotic" when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him and he seeks clinical help for it—or others seek it for him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal" because it doesn't occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or another washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways.
Through being too knowing the fox lost his tail.
Government | Guilt | People | Public | Truth | Warning | Government |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
And what do you fear lady? he asked. ?A cage ? she said. ?To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.
Conspiracy | Guilt | Murder | Murder |