This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
The sound of the English country families baying for broken glass.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
The audiences certainly have [declined]. If I go to the theatre now I find people come there to eat and smoke and talk to one another. And look like scarecrows.
Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
As a mind, who the hell else is there left for me to take an interest in?
The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.
Death | Distinguish | Gold | Lesson |
Love is an echo in the feelings of a unity subsisting between two persons which is founded both on likeness and on complementary differences. Without the likeness there would be no attraction; without the challenge of the complementary differences there could not be the closer interweaving and the inextinguishable mutual interest which is the characteristic of all deeper relationships.
She remembered the heroines of novels she had read, and the legion of lyrical those adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those whom she had love so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures, long dream of her youth was coming true. He remembered the heroines of novels she read and the lyrical legion of adulterous women those began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. Now she saw herself as one of those whom she had love so envied: she was becoming, in reality, one of that gallery of fictional figures, long dream of her youth was the coming true.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: "How do you want the world to be in fifty years?" and "What do you want your life to be like five years from now?" the answers are quite often preceded by "Provided there is still a world" and "Provided I am still alive." To the often-heard question, ?Who are they, this new generation?? one is tempted to answer, Those who hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they who utterly deny them? the answer may well be, Those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.
Living beings, men and animals, are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this precisely because they are subjects and objects-perceiving and being perceived-at the same time.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide; they are fit for world existence.
Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
Thank you, pretty pussy, was the death of my cat.
Death | Good | Hypothesis | Individual | Phenomena | Sense | Loss |