This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passions, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provisions we can make of the goods of fortune.
Beauty | Genius | Good | Little | Mind | Power | Rest | Sensibility | Taste | Words | Beauty |
The elevated sentiments and high examples which poetry, eloquence, and history are often bringing under our view naturally tend to nourish in our minds public spirit, the love of glory, contempt of external fortune, and the admiration of what is truly illustrious and great.
Baseness | Discipline | Enjoyment | Heart | Mind |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines and goddesses into muses. Who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Better | Day | Death | Little | Mind | Mystery | Need | Reason | Size | Soul | Will | Think |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
A sudden squawked command caused everyone within earshot to act for a split second as if they were shaking invisible martinis
And from each other look thou lead them thus till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep.
Can’t help it? Nonsense! What we are is up to us. Our bodies are like gardens and our willpower is like the gardener. Depending on what we plant—weeds or lettuce, or one kind of herb rather than a variety, the garden will either be barren and useless, or rich and productive. If we didn’t have rational minds to counterbalance our emotions and desires, our bodily urges would take over. We’d end up in ridiculous situations. Thankfully, we have reason to cool our raging lusts. In my opinion, what you call love is just an offshoot of lust. Othello, Act I, Scene 3
Better | Care | Duty | Fear | Flattery | Little | Lord | Man | Men | Mind | Time | Will | Words | Following |
Better conquest never canst thou make, than warn thy constant and thy nobler parts against giddy, loose suggestions.
Cease thy counsel, for thy words fall into my ears as priceless as water into a sieve.
Can'st thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude; and, in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 1
But all the story of the night told over, and their minds transfigur'd so together, more witnesseth than fancy's images, and grows to something of great constancy, but howsoever strange, and admirable. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v, Scene 1
In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.
Mind |
Either the nation whose tyrant you would destroy is ripe for the assertion and maintenance of its liberty, or it is not. If it be, the tyrant ought to be deposed with every appearance of publicity. Nothing can be more improper than for an affair, interesting to the general weal, to be conducted as if it were an act of darkness and shame. It is an ill lesson we read to mankind, when a proceeding, built upon the broad basis of general justice, is permitted to shrink from public scrutiny. The pistol and the dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue. To proscribe all violence, and neglect no means of information and impartiality, is the most effectual security we can have, for an issue conformable to reason and truth.
Force | Man | Mind | Office | Right | Sense | Suffering | Truth | Wrong |
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.
Mind | Time | Circumstance |
In cases where everything is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question.
Mind |
Liberty is one of the best of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed.
Accident | Consideration | Contradiction | Control | Experiment | Father | Indulgence | Little | Man | Means | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Persuasion | Power | Trust | Will | Happiness |
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
Consciousness | Existence | Nature |