This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The tragedy is that so many people look for self-confidence and respect everywhere except within themselves, so they fail in their search.
People | Respect | Self-confidence | Tragedy | Respect |
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.
The traditional religious rituals are important; it makes us partners in the experience of others Assembly of worship and prayer. But we must never forget the experience of spiritual experience of love is the first process and not in the rules of love… Traditional religions’ practices are important. They allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer, but we must never forget spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love, and with love, there are no rules some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior, others may turn to reading books of advice from experts on relationships but this is all folly. The heart decides and what it decides is all that really matters… We are not worshipping anyone or anything, we are simply communing with creation… Tragedy always brings about radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss.
Advice | Books | Change | Control | Emotions | Experience | Heart | Love | Reading | Tragedy | Worship |
Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
Despair | Melancholy | Pleasure | Sorrow | Sympathy | Tragedy |
Peter L. Berger, fully Peter Ludwig Berger
His consuming interest remains in the world of men, their institutions, their history, their passions. And because he is interested in men, nothing that men do can be altogether tedious...He will naturally be interested in the events that engage men’s ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy. But he will also be fascinated by the commonplace, the everyday. He will know reverence, but this reverence will not prevent him from wanting to see and to understand. He may sometimes feel revulsion or contempt , but this will also not deter him from wanting to have his questions answered. ...in his quest for understanding, moves through the world of men without respect for the usual lines of demarcation. Nobility ad degradation, power and obscurity, intelligence and folly -- these are equally interesting to him, however unequal they may be in his personal values or tastes. This his questions may lead him to all possible levels of society, the best and least known places, the most respected and the most despised. ...he will find himself in all these places because his own questions have so taken possession of him that he has little choice but to seek for answers.
Choice | Contempt | Events | Folly | Intelligence | Little | Men | Nobility | Nothing | Power | Respect | Reverence | Tragedy | Will | World | Respect |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life.
Body | Harmony | Individual | Tragedy |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
We are all called upon to do everything possible to banish from society not only the tragedy of war but also every violation of human rights, beginning with the indisputable right to life, which every person enjoys from the very moment of conception.
The greatest tragedy in the world is a divided church. We must come together. So don't start talking about doctrine, because if you do, we shall be divided. But there is one thing we can do. We may not be able to agree about doctrine, but we can always pray together.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
I think it would be a great tragedy ... if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line. I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.
Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan
Most tax revisions didn't improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers.
Books | Children | Day | Decision | Life | Life | Rest | Right | Rights | Tragedy | Will | Child | Happiness |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.
Consciousness | Heart | Reflection | Thought | Tragedy | Thought |
For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.'
Included in this almost nothing, as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet—an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being.
Good | Joy | Kill | Kindness | Life | Life | Myth | Tragedy | World |
The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with at stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)