This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Richard Aldington, born Edward Godfree Aldington
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?
Melancholy | Need | Tears |
Rose Macauley, fully Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay
The superior thing, in this as in other departments of life, was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual...Mystery at Geneva
History | Imagination | Melancholy | Past | World |
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going, Secretly armed against all death's endeavor Safe though all safety's lost safe where men fall And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.
Grief | Melancholy | Wise | Think |
Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
The only road, the sure road to unquestioned credit and a sound financial condition is the exact and punctual fulfilment of every pecuniary obligation, public and private, according to its letter and spirit.
Desire | Life | Life | Melancholy | Public |
To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.
Ends | Family | God | Melancholy | Nothing | Public | Thinking | God |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. It is cocaine, he said, a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?
Heart | Light | Melancholy | Woman |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Beginning | Bible | Character | Enough | Events | Genius | Happy | Ideas | Inconsistency | Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Need | Reading | Spirit | Style | Thought | Understanding | Will | Woman | Bible | Old | Thought |
Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
Melancholy | Right |
There are plenty of decent legislators, and plenty of able legislators; but the blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined. Both qualities are necessary for the man who is to wage active battle against the powers that prey. He must be clean of life, so that he can laugh when his public or his private record is searched; and yet being clean of life will not avail him if he is either foolish or timid. He must walk warily and fearlessly, and while he should never brawl if he can avoid it, he must be ready to hit hard if the need arises. Let him remember, by the way, that the unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.
Melancholy | Spirit | Words |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.
Good | Melancholy | Soul |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
A state of conscience is higher than a state of innocence.
Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.
Better | Fear | Looks | Man | Melancholy | Mind | Nothing | Opinion | Principles | Sound | Suppression | Truth | Will | Learn |
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Care | Guilt | Melancholy | Time | Will |
Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.
I was a poet too; but modern taste is so refined and delicate and chaste, that verse, whatever fire the fancy warms, without a creamy smoothness has no charms. Thus, all success depending on an ear, and thinking I might purchase it too dear, if sentiment were sacrific'd to sound, and truth cut short to make a period round, I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse than caper in the morris-dance of verse.
Liberty | Melancholy | Time | Witness | Understand |
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.
Benevolence | Good | Mankind | Melancholy | Question |