This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observation of time and place and of decency in general that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other that a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
Cause | Judgment | Manners | Observation | Reality | Skill | Taste | Time | Wrong |
Man is to a great degree a creature of his own making and, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation.
Man |
Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.
Contention | Despair | Fear | Force | Future | History | Humanity | Love | Man | Mankind | Memory | Mind | Motives | Nature | Past | Peace | Pity | Power | Pride | Property | Silence | Society | Submission | Success | Society |
Let to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose... There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub.
Life | Life | Need | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Silence | Will |
All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.
Esteem | Individual | Pride | Search | Self | Self-esteem |
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Search | Unhappiness | Happiness |
The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.
Envy | Esteem | Greed | Self | Self-esteem |
Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy… Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life.
Fear | Guilt | Happy | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | Power | Search | Time | Learn | Understand |
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
All motion or natural action takes place in time, more or less rapidly, but still in determined moments well ascertained by nature. Even those actions which appear to take effect suddenly, and in the twinkling of an eye (as we express it), are found to admit of greater or less rapidity.
There are countless places of refuge, there is only one place of salvation; but the possibilities of salvation, again, are as numerous as all the places of refuge.
It is not true that the relations between the sexes are of the same order with the rest of man’s instincts. They have social consequences which place them in a class apart.
Consequences | Man | Order | Rest |
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
Cause | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Mission | Purpose | Purpose | Search | Story |
This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing.
Body | Children | Duty | Education | Good | Love | Men | Torture | Wise | World |
In Hell there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, being a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself, is the paradise of the worthless.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions.
Art | Consciousness | Crime | Emotions | Eternal | Experience | Heart | Imagination | Inspiration | Man | Men | Mind | Misfortune | Nature | Opinion | Perception | Pleasure | Power | Present | Sense | Soul | Thought | Wickedness | Misfortune | Art | Thought |
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.