This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.
Praise |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Pride is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Pleasure is in general, dangerous and pernicious to virtue. - To be able, therefore, to furnish pleasure that is harmless and pure and unalloyed, is as great a power as man can possess.
Children | Cultivation | Pity |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Were a man not to marry a second time, it might be concluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a second wife, he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.
Desire | Diligence | Disease | Envy | Money | Nothing | Regard | Respect | Torture | Wealth | Wise | Respect | Value |
Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL
One should meditate on the form of God concentrating the mind on all the features. The person of self-control should withdraw the organs from the sense-objects with the help of the mind, and with the intellect [the determinative faculty] as guide, direct the mind to the entire form. Then he should concentrate the mind --- distributed all over the form --- on one part and think of the smiling countenance alone and nothing else.
Eternal | Goals | Life | Life | Pity | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Theoretical |
By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep; nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.
Simeon ben Azai, sometimes Ben Azai
Whoever does not engage in reproductive sexual relations, lo, such a one sheds blood and diminishes the divine image, since it says, For in the image of God he made man. And it says, And you be fruitful and multiply (Gen 9:67)
Honor |
I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.
Will |
The combination of these two facts — the longing in the depth of the heart for absolute good, and the power, though only latent, of directing attention and love to a reality beyond the world and of receiving good from it — constitutes a link which attaches every man without exception to that other reality. Whoever recognizes that reality recognizes also that link. Because of it, he holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect. This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings. Whatever formulation of belief or disbelief a man may choose to make, if his heart inclines him to feel this respect, then he in fact also recognizes a reality other than this world's reality. Whoever in fact does not feel this respect is alien to that other reality also.
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
In the world of mind, as in that of matter, we always occupy a position. He who is continually changing his point of view will see more, and that too more clearly, than one who, statue-like, forever stands upon the same pedestal; however lofty and well-placed that pedestal may be.
Circumstances | Effort | Friend | Good | Imagination | Little | Pity | Retirement | Traitor | Will |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.
Aid | Authenticity | Comfort | Faith | Giving | Man | Praise | Truth | Unhappiness | War | Woman | Yielding | Victim |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labour equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal superabundance.
Admiration | Pity |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.
Pity |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
It is a question of cubic capacity, said he; a man with so large a brain must have something in it.
Doubt | Happy | Impression | Pity |
Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse. The offenders acquire impunity by increasing their ravaging.