This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.
Conversation | Music | People | Price | Public | Time | Words | World |
But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about.
Conversation | Criticism | Meaning | Power | Prayer | Sense | Soul |
Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
Caution | Conversation | God | Good | Light | Means | Meditation | Nothing | Prayer | Soul | Spirit | Will | Wills | God |
When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
Conversation | Meaning |
William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne
Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse.
Absurd | Circumstances | Contrast | Conversation | Friend | Language | Learning | Lord | Method | Reason | Spirit | Strength | Wonder | World |
Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe, A tale of folly and of wasted life, Hope against hope, the bitter dregs of strife, Ending, where all things end, in death at last.
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Consolation for unhappiness can often be found in a certain satisfaction we get from looking unhappy.
Confidence in conversation has a greater share than wit.
The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice.
Conversation | People | Reason | Thinking |
Only the contemptible fear contempt.
Conversation | People | Think |
It is necessary to form a distinct notion of what is meant by the word volition in order to understand the import of the word will; for this last word expresses the power of mind of which volition is the act.
Appearance | Conversation | Genius | Impression | Man | Memory | Observation | Opinion |
O, call back yesterday, did time return, And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men! To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late, O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state; For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead, Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispersed, and fled.
Attention | Ends | Men | Music | Taste | Truth | Words | Youth | Youth |
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker.
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven’t; there’s no proof of it.
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POLONIUS: My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? POLONIUS: By th'mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel. POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel. HAMLET: Or like a whale? POLONIUS: Very like a whale. HAMLET: Then I will come to my mother by and by. - They fool me to the top of my bent. - I will come by and by.
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