This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.
Beauty passes, wisdom remains. (Used to make a point that wisdom matters more than physical beauty.)
It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his friends.
Affectation | Change | Choice | Enough | Literature | Little | Memory | Spirit | Wonder | Work | Poem |
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
The secret I learned early on from my father was to run scared and never think I had it made. I never felt I was completely adequate to the job and always ran scared. The fundamental for our success was running scared.
Attention | Enthusiasm | Important | Means | Perfection |
Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality.
Advice | Body | Genius | Haste | Important | Life | Life | Literature | Man | Nothing | Perfection | Play | Pleasure | Popularity | Reason | Recreation | Wonder | Work | Think |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted.
Business | Little | Men | Order | Quiet | Time | World | Business | Learn |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I only knew two things about Seattle: one, it was a long way from racist, sexist, homophobic, hide-bound, purse-lipped, gun-toting, church-crazed, flag-saluting, bourbon-swilling, buzz-cut, save your Confederate money, boys! Richmond, Virginia; and two, there was reputed to be something not quite right about its weather.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that.
Control | Fate | Order | Price | Protest | Weakness | Will | Fate |
And then, the justice; in fair round belly, with good capon lin'd, with eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances, and so he plays his part.
ALONSO: You cram these words into mine ears against the stomach of my sense. Would I had never married my daughter there! for, coming thence, my son is lost; and, in my rate, she too, who is so far from Italy remov'd I ne'er again shall see her. O thou mine heir of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish hath made his meal on thee? FRANCESCO: Sir, he may live: I saw him beat the surges under him, and ride upon their backs; he trod the water, whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted the surge most swol'n that met him; his bold head 'bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar'd himself with his good arms in lusty stroke to the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd, as stooping to relieve him; I not doubt he came alive to land. The Tempest, Act ii, Scene 1
And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
But I perceive men must learn now with pity to dispense; for policy sits above conscience. Timon of Athens, Act iii, Scene 2
But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth; his words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, his love sincere, his thoughts immaculate, his tears pure messengers sent from his heart, his heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7
Man | Perfection |
Be not easily won to our requests; play the maid's part: still answer nay, and take it.
Desire of having is the sin of covetousness. Twelfth Night, Act v, Scene 1
Art | Father | Perfection | Art |
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.