This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbitÂ’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbitÂ’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
His decision had been staying in deep and dark, away from all the traps and bait and betrayals. My decision was to go there to look, beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are alone each other and has been since noon. And anyone who comes to avail ourselves, either him or me.
Civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.
The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
Ecotopians … had always regarded anthropology as a field with great practical importance. After Independence they had begun to experiment in adapting anthropological hypotheses to real life. It was only over a great deal of resistance that a radical idea such as ritual warfare had become legally practicable … But its advocates had persisted, convinced … that it was essential to develop some kind of open civic expression for the physical competitiveness that seemed to be inherent in man’s biological programming – and otherwise came out in perverse forms, like war.
Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nineÂteenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primiÂtive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reliÂgions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Control | Death | Fighting | Good | Health | Illusion | Life | Life | Man | Means | Necessity | Need | Play | Question | Reality | Right | Science | Security | Self-deception | Time | Will | World |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
By guts I mean, grace under pressure.
Conversation | Little | People | Writing |
And so, the question for the science of mental health must beÂcome an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reÂflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live? We will see the import of this at the close of this chapter, but right now we must remind ourselves that when we talk about the need for illusion we are not being cynical. True, there is a great deal of falseness and self-deception in the cultural causa-sui project, but there is also the necessity of this project. Man needs a "second" world, a world of humanly created meaning, a new reality that he can live, dramatize, nourish himself in. "Illusion" means creative play at its highest level. Cultural illusion is a necessary ideology of self-justification, a heroic dimension that is life itself to the symbolic animal. To lose the security of heroic cultural illusion is to die—that is what "deculturation" of primitives means and what it does. It kills them or reduces them to the animal level of chronic fighting and fornication. Life becomes possible only in a continual alcoholic stupor. Many of the older American Indians were relieved when the Big Chiefs in Ottawa and Washington took control and prevented them from warring and feuding. It was a relief from the constant anxiety of death for their loved ones, if not for themselves. But they also knew, with a heavy heart, that this eclipse of their traditional hero-systems at the same time left them as good as dead.
Absolute | Anxiety | Anxiety | Cause | Confidence | Order | Parents | Power | Question | Security | Self | Society | Terror | Understanding | Weakness | Worth | Society | Child | Think |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
We've got a generation now who were born with semi-equality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attaché cases and our three-piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
For all organisms, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil – it threatens to stop experience. But men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it.
Body | Contradiction | Man | People | Worth |
We now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death... Heidegger brought these fears to the center of his existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of [humanity] is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.
People |
A meeting has no formal agenda; instead, it opens with a voicing of ‘concerns’ by many participants. As these are discussed (often amid friendly laughter, as well as a few angry outbursts) general issues begin to take shape. But there are no Roberts’ Rules of Order, no motions, no votes – instead, a gradual ventilation of feelings, some personal antagonisms worked through, and a gradual consensual focusing on what needs to be done. Once this consensus is achieved, people take pains to assuage the feelings of those members who have had to give ground in order to achieve the consensus. Only after this healing process takes place is there formal ratification of the decisions taken …
Certainly Ecotopians regard trees as being alive in almost a human sense Â… And equally certainly, lumber in Ecotopia is cheap and plentiful Â… Wood therefore takes the place that aluminum, bituminous facings, and many other modern materials occupy with us.
Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, "Yes, I've got dreams, of course, I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.