This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field, you do me mischief. Fie, Demetrius! Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex: we cannot fight for love, as men ay do; we should be woo'd, and were not made to woo. I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell, to die upon the hand I love so well. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act ii, Scene 1
Nature |
As she in beauty, education, blood, Holds hand with any princess of the world. The Life and Death of King John, Act ii, Scene 1
Bounty, being free itself, thinks all others so.
Happy | Intemperance | Nature |
Between two hawks, which flies the higher pitch; Between two dogs, which hath the deeper mouth; Between two blades, which bears the better temper; Between two horses, which doth bear him best; Between two girls, which hath the merriest eye,— I have perhaps some shallow spirit of judgment; But in these nice sharp quillets of the law, Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw. King Henry VI. Part I. Act ii. Sc. 4.
Do not give dalliance too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw to the fire in the blood. The Tempest, Act iv, Scene 1
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together; Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare. Youth is full of sport, age's breadth is short; Youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame. Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee. The Passionate Pilgrim
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
Nature | Philosophy |
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
Consciousness | Existence | Nature |
I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.
I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
Human nature | Nature | Psychology |
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
Danger | Firmness | Man | Nature | Opposition | Speech | Will | Danger | Circumstance | Truths |
William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
The word perception is, in the language of philosophers previous to Reid, used in a very extensive signification. By Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, and others, it is employed in a sense almost as unexclusive as consciousness, in its widest signification. By Reid this word was limited to our faculty acquisitive of knowledge, and to that branch of this faculty whereby, through the senses, we obtain a knowledge of the external world. But his limitation did not stop here. In the act of external perception he distinguished two elements, to which he gave the names of perception and sensation. He ought perhaps to have called these perception proper and sensation proper, when employed in his special meaning.