This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion...
If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we must stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.
Angels | Common Sense | Greed | Happy | Justice | Land | Little | Lust | Risk | Sense | Stupidity | Virtue | Virtue |
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
Faith is the door to mysteries. What the bodily eyes are to sensory objects, faith is to the eyes of the intellect that gaze at hidden treasures.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
Amusements | Idleness | Reading |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it.
Appearance | Idleness |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The public pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit. Very few carry their philosophy to places of diversion, or are very careful to analyze their enjoyments. The general condition of life is so full of misery, that we are glad to catch delight without inquiring whence it comes, or by what power it is bestowed.
Body | Corruption | Idleness | People | Prosperity | Public | Society | Society |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste on the other, by which, on the same income, another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.
Stupidity | Tenderness |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant and which is animated only by Faith and Hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I passed close to the pterodactyl swamp, and as I did so, with a dry, crisp, leathery rattle of wings, one of these great creatures--it was twenty feet at least from tip to tip--rose up from somewhere near me and soared into the air. As it passed across the face of the moon the light shone clearly through the membranous wings, and it looked like a flying skeleton against the white, tropical radiance.
Idleness |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.
Courage | Danger | Means | Stupidity | Danger | Think | Understand |
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
Let us never forget this: since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine. That is where our frontier lies.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Absence | Asceticism | Control | Fear | People | Position | Power | Question | Rancor | Research | Responsibility | Shame | Speculation | Stupidity | Thinking | Thought | Asceticism | Thought |
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.
Beauty | Enough | Good | Idleness | Man | Nothing | Occupation | Opinion | People | Play | Principles | Rights | Service | Sound | Superfluities | Will | Woman | Talent | Beauty | Think |
Even if your mother is seen starving avoid the actions condemned by wise men.
And yet without labor there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.
Consecration | Folly | Rule | Stupidity |
For suffering and enduring there is no remedy, but striving and doing.