This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My grandfather returned to what he called ‘studying.’ He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession.
Evidence | Heart | History | Hope | Improvement | Individual | Little | Protest | Public | Qualities | Spirit | Success |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
That's all window dressing. That's not fundamental. That's not getting at change and the transformation that must take place. Sure we have to solve problems. Certainly stamp out the fire. Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, overreacting; acting without knowledge, the effect is to make things worse. With the best of intentions and best efforts, managing by results is, in effect, exactly the same, as Dr. Myron Tribus put it, while driving your automobile, keeping your eye on the rear view mirror, what would happen? And that's what management by results is, keeping your eye on results.
Design | Improvement | System |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Because I threw our look with a gray question mark in your eyes. Oh, no, no empeces again (incredulity, exasperation). Well never dignabas to believe that I could feel the desire, without specific intent-to sink my face in your plaid skirt, my love. The fragility of your bare arms ... How I longed to wrap those arms, and your four limpid lovely-curled-a colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands and stretch the skin back from your temples and slanted eyes and kiss your ... Please leave me alone, will you?, You said. My God, leave me alone. And I got up from the floor while you looked twitching his face in a deliberate imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am a miserable, no matter, continue with my miserable story.
Benevolence | Courtesy | Failure | Failure |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Battle | Books | Growth | Life | Life | Loafing | Man | Mind | Obsession | Pleasure | Rest | Science | Search | Struggle | World | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
You fear the books as some towns feared the violins. Keep reading, and let dance; these two amusements will never do harm to the world.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.
Pleasure |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The richest endowments of the mind are temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Prudence is a universal virtue, which enters into the composition of all the rest; and where she is not, fortitude loses its name and nature.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Need | Reconciliation |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Intelligence | Man | Mind | Woman |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent... there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
Art | Intelligence | Life | Life | Art |
To be a saint is the exception to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. Sin is a gravitation.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man... What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.
Quite naturally, common people take inspirations from them and try to emulate them.
Praises make the wicked deaf(they can't tolerate criticism) while people who praise become successful because of their humility.
In the Divine Path, there is no chance of failure; it is the Path of Love.