This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Those evils I deserve, yet despair not of His final pardon whose ear is ever open and his eye gracious to readmit the supplicant.
John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
Nothing can be more destructive to vigor of action than protracted, anxious fluctuation, through resolutions adopted, rejected, resumed, and suspended, and nothing causes a greater expense of feeling. A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself; he is as a wave of the sea, or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about as it listeneth.
Lillian Hellman, fully Lillian Florience "Lily" Hellman
God helps all the children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage can of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess them up for all time, or hating the trash so much they will waste their future on the hatred.
Children | Ends | Future | God | Life | Life | Passion | People | Struggle | Time | Waste | Will | Understand |
Acquire good physique and mental robustness which comes from fresh air, sound and plain food, constant and compelling attention to waste matter, proper and peaceful sleep, and concentration on true religion, ethics, art and literature.
Art | Attention | Ethics | Good | Literature | Religion | Sound | Waste | Art |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
One difficulty about achieving social improvement is that we tend to uncritically regard any advance in either differentiation or in integration as a good thing. If a new law increases freedom, it must be progress, as is a new movement that fosters the feeling of solidarity among people. yet neither of these programs is likely to improve matters without the complementary contribution of the other. Complexity requires the synergy of these dialectically opposed force; a gain in only one is likely to promote confusion and chaos. We think of social entropy as being caused by a loss of liberty or a loss of common values; but gains in either at the expense of its complement are just as dangerous.
Difficulty | Force | Freedom | Good | Improvement | Integration | Law | Liberty | People | Progress | Regard | Loss | Think |
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and some absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess,, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often waste its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.
Ambition | Art | Character | Dogma | Genius | Ingenuity | Peril | Poetry | Pride | Sensuality | System | Truth | Talent | Ambition | Ingenuity |
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on yesterdays.
Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
Day | Doubt | Good | Nonsense | Spirit | Tomorrow | Waste | Old |
Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; `tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.
Beauty | Conformity | Debt | Heart | Worship |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
Emptiness here, Emptiness thee, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small; no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and Non-Being. Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this.
In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.
Change | Children | Duty | Future | Good | Individual | Justice | Law | Moral law | Past | People | Present | Right | Time | Waste |
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath time made me his numbering clock: my thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous goans, which strike upon my heart, which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans show minutes, times, and hours. Richard III, Act v, Scene 5