This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
Action | Better | Consideration | Folly | Force | Giving | Heaven | History | Humanity | Individual | Inevitable | Law | Life | Life | Man | Means | Men | Power | Question | Relationship | Right | Sacrifice | Servitude | Time |
Archibald Geikie, fully Sir Archibald Geikie
If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.
Antiquity | Argument | Error | Eternity | Evidence | Evolution | Lord | Past | Time |
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Men |
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
Art | Enlightenment | Guidance | Literature | Science | Guidance | Art |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man, it is perhaps better to take the knee of the trouser. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.
Care | Day | Fate | Heaven | Will | World | Fate | Friends |
Alphonsus Liguori, fully Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori
Yet you should practice the greatest possible love and confidence in treating with Him.
Thérèse de Lisieux, fully Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin NULL
All the Saints have understood this, and more especially perhaps those who have enlightened the world with the luminous teaching of the Gospel. Was it not from prayer that Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa and so many other friends of God drew that wondrous science which enraptures the greatest intellects?
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
The more loving you are to the young, the greater will be the effects of God’s grace.
Miracles | Providence |
In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).
Events | History | Struggle | Learn | Understand |
If we must deal in metaphors [to characterize the Cambrian Explosion as well as the evolution of complexity], I prefer a very broad, low and uniform slope. Water drops randomly at the top and usually dries before flowing anywhere. Occasionally, it works its way downslope and carves a valley to channel future flows. The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment, we might obtain no valleys at all, or a completely different system. Yet we now stand at the shore line contemplating the fine spacing of valleys and their even contact with the sea. How easy it is to be misled and to assume that no other landscape could possibly have arisen.
If I could have those sixty seconds within Bradypus... would I not receive a plea for humans to pause, reassess - and above all, slow down?
Blame | Example | Individual | Literature | Men | Music | Past | Sympathy | Will | Understand |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Appearance | Evolution | Means | Theories | Value |
Christopher Wren, the leading architect of London's reconstruction after the great fire of 1666, lies buried beneath the floor of his most famous building, St. Paul's cathedral. No elaborate sarcophagus adorns the site. Instead, we find only the famous epitaph written by his son and now inscribed into the floor: si monumentum requiris, circumspice—if you are searching for his monument, look around. A tad grandiose, perhaps, but I have never read a finer testimony to the central importance—one might even say sacredness — of actual places, rather than replicas, symbols, or other forms of vicarious resemblance.
Flexibility | Nature | Universe | Flexibility |