This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
We obtain our concept of the unconscious, therefore, from the theory of repression … We see, however that we have two kinds of unconscious — that which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and that which is repressed and not capable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It's completely stupid to write love letters, cannot be reproduced by a simple letter, but what to do when this terrible ocean separates us from the man we love?
Emotions | Experience | Instinct | Motives | Opinion | Order | Value |
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl of Bewdley
If I did not believe that our work was done in the faith and hope that at some day, it may be a million years hence, the Kingdom of God will spread over the whole world, I would have no hope, I could do no work, and I would give my office over this morning to anyone who would take it.
All creatures ignorant of their own natures, could not universally in the whole kind, and in every climate and country, without any difference in the whole world, tend to a certain end, if some overruling wisdom did not preside over the world and guide them: and if the creatures have a Conductor, they have a Creator; all things are “turned round about by his counsel, that they may do whatsoever he commands them, upon the face of the world in the earth.” So that in this respect the folly of atheism appears. Without the owning a God, no account can be given of those actions of creatures, that are an imitation of reason.
For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, hermit-like.
Events | Instinct | Memory | Oblivion | Order | Power | Regard |
What shakes the eye but the invisible? Running from God's the longest race of all.
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
The love of a mother for her children is dominant, selfish and selfless at the same time.... The love of a father for his son or daughter is, if it is ever to love is a far-hearted, generous, moody and thoughtful gift giving without hope of reply, a farewell to a troubled wanderer wants to protect he likes, a properly weighed judgment about the strength and weakness, full of compassion for the failure, and full of pride to success.
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-colored foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.
The other-than-human species, through their genetic endowment, discover their survival context with only limited disturbance of the larger complex of life systems. They find their niche quickly, or else they perish.
Nobility | Understand |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Chastity |
Our willingness to take an alternative approach to a problem will perhaps relax the obsessive fixation of the adversary on his view, which he believes is the only reasonable possibility and which he is determined to impose on everyone else by coercion…This mission of humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
Attention | Bible | Cost | Fidelity | God | Labor | Means | Mystery | Reality | Responsibility | Risk | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Truth | Work | God | Bible |
Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
Aspiration | Duty | Human race | Instinct | Peace | Race | Responsibility | Sacrifice | Survival | War | Weapons | Work | Aspiration | Understand |
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
Ambition | Fidelity | Grace | Humility | Means | Need | Pleasure | Prejudice | Reality | Sin | Sincerity | Ambition |