This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco
To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.
The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
Absence | Evil | Extreme | Fear | Hunger | Initiative | Need | Public | Risk | Security | Soul |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
You cannot expect that a friend should be like the atmosphere, which confers all manner of benefits upon you, and without which indeed it would be impossible to live, but at the same time is never in your way.
Beginning | Events | Important | Lesson | Happiness | Learn |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his opinions upon the Milky Way.
Principles | Reason |
I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science—and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.
Geniality | Human nature | Kindness | Nature | Time |
Now what greater comfort is there than this, that there is one presides in the world who is so wise he cannot be mistaken, so faithful he cannot deceive, so pitiful he cannot neglect his people, and so powerful that he can make stones even to be turned into bread if he please!
Wanting to play against oneself is ultimately a paradox as big as wanting to jump over your own shadow
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
The Stoics agree to put in the forefront the doctrine of presentation and sensation, inasmuch as the standard by which the truth of things is tested is generically a presentation, and again the theory of assent and that of apprehension and thought, which precedes all the rest, cannot be stated apart from presentation. For presentation comes first; then thought, which is capable of expressing itself, puts into the form of a propositions that which the subject receives from a presentation. [Diocles the Magnesian]
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress. -
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
And now, first and foremost, you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy. That object is not to preserve forests because they beautiful, though that is good in itself; nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You yourselves have got to keep this practical object before your minds: to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress, or safety of the country is of no interest to the Government, and should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as the means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation.
Abundance | Aptitude | Business | Caution | Individual | Life | Life | Means | Men | Nations | People | Position | Reason | Rule | Strength | Time | Wealth | Will | World | Business |
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, when small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one;
Desolation | Public | Sadness |
Sex is unclean, not because of the pleasure, but because of the suffering it brings.