This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator.
Mother |
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Better | Enlightenment | Experience | Learning | Rest | Will | Worth |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.
Mother |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
Mother |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
But some emotions don't make a lot of noise. It's hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint - like a heartbeat. And pure love why, some days it's so quiet, you don't even know it's there.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."
In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils.'
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
It is upsetting to many parents that their teen-agers introduce them to their friends as encyclopedia salesmen who are just passing through ... if they introduce them at all. I have some acquaintances who hover in dark parking lots, enter church separately and crouch in furnace rooms so their teen-agers will not be accused of having parents.
Compassion | Judgment | Mother |
We said that the point was that even with the highest personal development and liberation, the person comes up against the real despair of the human condition. Indeed, because of that developÂment his eyes are opened to the reality of things; there is no turnÂing back to the comforts of a secure and armored life. The person is stuck with the full problem of himself, and yet he cannot rely on himself to make any sense out of it. For such a person, as Camus said, "the weight of days is dreadful." What does it mean, then, we questioned in Chapter Four, to talk fine-sounding phrases like "Being cognition," "the fully centered person," "full humanism," "the joy of peak experiences," or whatever, unless we seriously qualify such ideas with the burden and the dread that they also carry? Finally, with these questions we saw that we could call into doubt the pretensions of the whole therapeutic enterprise. What joy and comfort can it give to fully awakened people? Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life's way. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Death | Experience | Fear | Life | Life |
Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the others, disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.
Experience | Love | Man | Nature | Order | Understand |
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
Throughout the years I have set up my own rules about eating food: Never eat anything you can't pronounce. Beware of food that is described as, Some Americans say it tastes like chicken.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
You were our first miracle. You were the genesis of a marriage, the fulfillment of love, the promise of our infinity...You were the beginning.
Mother |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.
Enough | Experience | Good | Honesty | People | Will | Think |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?
Experience | Life | Life | Ugly |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn't wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manifacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant.
Absolute | Brotherhood | Consecration | Death | Duty | Experience | Light | Necessity | World |