This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.
Government | Opinion | People | War | Government | Old | Think |
Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett
A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.
The least degree of ambiguity, which leaves the mind in suspense as to the meaning, ought to be avoided with the greatest care.
Admiration | Contempt | History | Love | Public |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.
Hope | Personality | Public | Will |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the 'comfort' of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.
And thorough this distemperature we see the seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, and on old Hiems' thin and icy crown an odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds is, as in mockery, set. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act ii, Scene 1
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion, which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbors. This right flows from the very nature of man. First, all men are fallible: no man can be justified in setting up his judgment as a standard for others. We have no infallible judge of controversies; each man in his own apprehension is right in his decisions; and we can find no satisfactory mode of adjusting their jarring pretensions. If everyone be desirous of imposing his sense upon others, it will at last come to be a controversy, not of reason, but of force. Secondly, even if we had an in fallible criterion, nothing would be gained, unless it were by all men recognized as such. If I were secured against the possibility of mistake, mischief and not good would accrue, from imposing my infallible truths upon my neighbor, and requiring his submission independently of any conviction I could produce in his understanding. Man is a being who can never be an object of just approbation, any further than he is independent. He must consult his own reason, draw his own conclusions and conscientiously conform himself to his ideas of propriety. Without this, he will be neither active, nor considerate, nor resolute, nor generous.
Appearance | Assertion | Darkness | Destroy | Lesson | Means | Neglect | Nothing | Public | Reason | Security |
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.
Conversation | Music | People | Price | Public | Time | Words | World |
DON PEDRO: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick. BEATRICE: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it. DON PEDRO: You have put him down, lady, you have put him down. BEATRICE: So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools. Much Ado About Nothing, Act ii, Scene 1
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
Some associations may revivify it enough to make it flash, after a long oblivion, into consciousness.
Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a nightmare view of life, and its peculiar poisonousness, lies expressly in our holding two things together which cannot possibly agree.
O credulity, thou hast as many ears as fame has tongues, open to every sound of truth as of falsehood.
Love | Madness | Moderation | Public | Moderation |
The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed is mainly derived from the act of introspection.
Improvement | Method | Public |
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.