This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence
Enthusiasm | Love | Nothing | Work |
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do.
Abstract | Common Sense | Difficulty | Discussion | Duty | Imagination | Pacifism | Rationality | Reason | Sense | Utopia | Think |
There is at present in the world a cold reserve that keeps man at a distance from man. There is an art in the practice of which individuals communicate forever, without anyone telling his neighbor what estimate he forms of his attainments and character, how they ought to be employed, and how to be improved. There is a sort of domestic tactics, the object of which is to elude curiosity, and keep up the tenor of conversation, without the disclosure either of our feelings or opinions. The friend of justice will have no object more deeply at heart than the annihilation of this duplicity. The man whose heart overflows with kindness for his species will habituate himself to consider, in each successive occasion of social intercourse, how that occasion may be most beneficently improved. Among the topics to which he will be anxious to awaken attention, politics will occupy a principal share.
Art | Chance | Circumstances | Degeneracy | Discovery | History | Imagination | Important | Improvement | Literature | Observation | Past | Philosophy | Practice | Superstition | Will | Discovery | Art |
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
Day | Happy | Imagination | Man | People |
A pattern is either right or wrong.... It is no stronger than its weakest point.
I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain.
Happy | Imagination | Man | Memory | Men | Mind | Past | Pleasure | Soul | Will | Wills | Work | Think |
Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name
Imagination | Man | Men | Past |
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips, think but one thought of me up in the stars.
Contempt | Imagination |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.
Earth | Feelings | Imagination | People | Thinking | Thought | Parent | Thought |
Casuistry is the department of ethics, the great object of which is to lay down rules or canons for directing how to act wherever there is any room for doubt or hesitation.
O, wither’d is the garland of the war! The soldier’s pole is fall'n; young boys and girls are level now with men; the odds is gone, and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
Appetite | Good | Imagination | Thinking |
Or ere I could Give him that parting kiss which I had set Betwixt two charming words--comes in my father, And like the tyrannous breathing of the north Shakes all our buds from growing.
Appetite | Imagination |
All history shows the power of blood over circumstances, as agriculture shows the power of the seeds over the soil.
It is to be observed that every case of war averted is a gain in general, for it helps to form a habit of peace, and community habits long continued become standards of conduct.
Enthusiasm | People | Resentment |
Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.
Enthusiasm | Good | Indignation |
I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.
Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Time | Will |