This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Better | Day | Death | Little | Mind | Mystery | Need | Reason | Size | Soul | Will | Think |
Ay, marry, uncle; for I always thought It was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith.
Soul |
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think, few come within the compass of my curse,— wherein I did not some notorious ill, as kill a man, or else devise his death, ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, accuse some innocent and forswear myself, set deadly enmity between two friends, make poor men's cattle break their necks; set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, and bid the owners quench them with their tears. Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves, and set them upright at their dear friends' doors, even when their sorrows almost were forgot; and on their skins, as on the bark of trees, have with my knife carved in Roman letters, 'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.' Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly, and nothing grieves me heartily indeed but that I cannot do ten thousand more. Titus Andronicus, Act v, Scene 1
Soul |
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection. Henry V, Act iv, Scene 1
But say, my lord, it were not regist'red, methinks the truth should live from age to age, as 'twere retailed to all posterity, Even to the general all-ending day. King Richard III, Act iii, Scene 1
Despair | Intelligence | Soul | Will |
By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death ... and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next. Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 2
By the Lord, thou say'st true, lad--and is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench? PRINCE HENRY: As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle--and is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance? Henry IV, Part I, Act 1
He who will warrant his virtue in every possible situation is either an impostor or a fool.
Often quoted in forms that correspond only loosely to Hugo's original words, for example: No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
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 |
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest.
Reprehension is a kind of middle thing betwixt admonition and correction: it is sharpe admonition, but a milde correction. It is rather to be used because it may be a meanes to prevent strokes and blowes, especially in ingenuous and good natured children. [Blows are] the last remedy which a parent can use: a remedy which may doe good when nothing else can.
Eternal | Fear | Good | Intention | Man | Salvation | Soul | Suffering | Will | Truths |
It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
Consciousness | Perception | Psychology | Sense |