This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let us cherish sympathy. By attention and exercise it may be improved in every man. It prepares the mind for receiving the impressions of virtue; and without it there can be no true politeness. Nothing is more odious than that insensibility which wraps a man up in himself and his own concerns, and prevents his being moved with either the joys or the sorrows of another.
Attention | Character | Man | Mind | Nothing | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue |
Talleyrand, fully Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1st Prince de Bénévent NULL
Too much sensibility creates unhappiness; too much insensibility leads to crime.
Crime | Sensibility | Unhappiness | Wisdom |
Suffering becomes beautiful when anybody bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
Cheerfulness | Greatness | Mind | Suffering |
The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things indicates a strange inversion.
Man | Sensibility | Trifles |
The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, are the marks of a strange inversion.
Man | Sensibility | Trifles |
Lewis W. Dillwyn, fully Lewis Weston Dillwyn
A phlegmatic insensibility is as different from patience, as a pool from a harbor. Into the one, indolence naturally sinks us; but if we arrive at the other it is by encountering many an adverse wind and rough wave, with a more skilful pilot at the helm than self, and a company under better command than the passions.
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!
Men |
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Will |
Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.
Evil | Good | Man | Melancholy | Reality | Thought | Happiness | Thought |
My Lord Anson, at the Admiralty, sends word to Chatham, then confined to his chamber by one of his most violent attacks of the gout, that it is impossible for him to fit out a naval expedition within the period to which he is limited. "Impossible!" cried Chatham, glaring at the messenger; "who talks to me of impossibilities?" Then starting to his feet, and forcing out great drops of agony on his brow with the excruciating torment of the effort, he exclaimed, "Tell Lord Anson that he serves under a minister who treads on impossibilities!"
He was as yet not sufficiently experienced in ruffianism to know that one villain always sacrifices another to advance his own project; he was credulous enough to believe in the old adage of 'honor amongst thieves.