This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionizes it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.
One mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Better | Fear | Relationship | Will | World |
Nevertheless the flames did die down -- whether exhausted from lack of supplies or choked by excessive feeding. Little by little, love was quenched by absence; regret was smothered by routine; and the fiery glow that had reddened her pale sky grew gray and gradually vanished... But the storm kept raging, her passion burned itself to ashes, no help was forthcoming, no new sun rose to the horizon. Night closed in completely around her, and she was left alone in a horrible void of piercing cold.
None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.
Play |
Love... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.
You can get by on charm for about 15 minutes. After that, you better know something.
World |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest.
Men |
We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a na‹ve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
World |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
Men |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature? the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
The famous assertion by Einstein that the length of a rod depends on its velocity and on the chosen definition of simultaneity. ...is based on the fact that we do not measure the length of the rod, but its projection on a system at rest. How the length of the projection depends on the choice of simultaneity can be illustrated by reference to a photograph taken through a focal-plane shutter. Such a shutter... consists of a wide band with a horizontal slit, which slides down vertically. Different bands are photographed successively on the film. Moving objects are therefore strangely distorted; the wheels of a rapidly moving car for instance, appear to be slanted. The shape of the objects in the picture will evidently depend on the speed of the shutter. Similarly, the length of the moving segment depends on the definition of simultaneity. One definition of simultaneity differs from another because events that are simultaneous for one definition occur successively for another. What may be a simultaneity projection of a moving segment for one definition is a "focal-plane shutter photograph" for another.
Men |