This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Diana Vreeland, born Diana Dalziel
Your world... you have created it for yourself, it is real to yourself, and therefore real to us... It is for you to discover yourself in a world where, alone and free, you may dream the possible dream: that the wondrous is real, because that is how you feel it to be, how you wish it to be... and how you wish it into being.
Isaac Abravanel, fully Don Itshak ben Yehouda Abravanel
The reward of the souls in the world beyond is their ability to attain the true concept of God which is a source of the most wonderful felicity, an attainment impossible for man in this early life because of the disturbances on the part of matter.
Ability | Attainment | God | Life | Life | Man | Reward | Wisdom | World | God |
To be of use in the world is the only way to be happy.
Those who get through the world without enemies are commonly three classes: the supple, the adroit, the phlegmatic. The leaden rule surmounts obstacles by yielding to them; the oiled wheel escapes friction; the cotton sack escapes damage by its impenetrable elasticity.
Be not content with the commonplace in character anymore than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.
Ambition | Attainment | Character | Conscience | Heart | Impression | Power | Will | World | Ambition |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only a page.
J. L. Austin, fully John Langshaw Austin
Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers.
The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought.
Character | Government | Individual | Justice | Question | Right | Will | Wisdom | World | Wrong | Government | Old | Think |
Strongest minds are often those of whom the noisy world hears last.