This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The violent desire of pleasing in the person reproved, may otherwise change into a despair of doing it, while he finds himself censured for faults he is not conscious of. A mind that is softened and humanized by friendship cannot bear frequent reproaches; either it must sink under the oppression, or abate considerably of the value and esteem it had for him who bestows them.
I confess my extreme embarrassment: I do not know in what capacity I was asked to talk about him, that for many years I live far away from what Anatole France called the city of the books, I who for many years (and through no fault of my own) do not I have only one book on the shelf of Benedetto Croce and I do my work on the ground floor, away from the upper echelons of philosophy and scholarly criticism. Benedetto Croce I met, I met him several times in Florence before the last war, when to ask to see him and talk to him was not devoid of some inconvenience. I think it was Bonciani the hotel and later in the house of Luigi Russo . And the other two times I have visited the Cross, in Naples, in his house, in the last years of his life.
The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.
Individual | Life | Life | Solitude |
Some small engagement at least in business not only sets a manÂ’s talents in the fairest light, and allots him a part to act in which a wife cannot well intermeddle, but gives frequent occasions for those little absences, which, whatever seeming uneasiness they may give, are some of the best preservatives of love and desire.
Esteem | Principles |
We are generally so much pleased with any little accomplishments, either of body or mind, which have once made us remarkable in the world, that we endeavor to persuade ourselves it is not in the power of time to rob us of them. We are eternally pursuing the same methods which first procured us the applauses of mankind. It is from this notion that an author writes on, though he is come to dotage; without ever considering that his memory is impaired, and that he hath lost that life, and those spirits, which formerly raised his fancy and fired his imagination. The same folly hinders a man from submitting his behavior to his age, and makes Clodius, who was a celebrated dancer at five-and-twenty, still love to hobble in a minuet, though he is past threescore. It is this, in a word, which fills the town with elderly fops and superannuated coquettes.
Human nature | Life | Life | Man | Nature | Nothing | Will |
There is something so gross in the carriage of some wives that they lose their husbandsÂ’ hearts for faults which, if a man has either good-nature or good-breeding, he knows not how to tell them of. I am afraid, indeed, the ladies are generally most faulty in this particular; who at their first giving into love find the way so smooth and pleasant that they fancy it is scarce possible to be tired in it. There is so much nicety and discretion required to keep love alive after marriage, and make conversation still new and agreeable after twenty or thirty years, that I know nothing which seems readily to promote it but an earnest endeavor to please on both sides, and superior good sense on the part of the man.
Change | Desire | Despair | Esteem | Mind | Friendship | Value |
Let them that are happy talk of piety; he that would work his adversary woe must take no account of laws.
Glory | Life | Life | Think | Understand |
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
Do we, holding that gods exist, deceive ourselves with unsubstantiated dreams, and lies, while random careless chance and change alone rule the world?
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
There is no bitterness to be compared with that between two people who once loved.
Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.