This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We have deprived ourselves of that liberty of transposition in the arrangement of words which the ancient languages enjoyed.
Duty | Gentleness | Nature | Reflection | Sense |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
Energy | Life | Life | Philosophy | Science | Sense | System | Teach |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
A slow smile bent back his foliage. I’ve a mind to lay you down and split you like a rack of mutton. What do you say to that?
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If death wants me, let him ride up on a pale mount, ashes in his mouth, ice in his testicles. Frankly, I do not like the way death does business.
Attention | Cause | Day | Death | Humor | Irony | Light | Memory | Religion | Sense | Thought | Will | Thought |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
I started before I was old enough to know better. My muse was a cradle-robber, a child-molester. She seduced an innocent, blue-eyed, tow-headed, pre-literate tot and turned him into a paragraph junkie. (In reply to how he got started as a novelist)
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
According to my mother, some sort of phantom stole into the room where I lay in my cradle and struck me on the head with a silver hammer. [In response to “To what do you attribute that marvelous imagination of yours?]
Come on, poor babe, some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens to be thy nurses. Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savageness aside, have done like offices of pity.
Common Sense | Sense | Study | Will |
It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.
Absolute | Action | Feelings | Impression | Judgment | Man | Reason | Sacred | Sense | Understanding | Intellect |
Dar'st thou die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great as when a giant dies. Measure for Measure, Act iii
Sense |
Either the nation whose tyrant you would destroy is ripe for the assertion and maintenance of its liberty, or it is not. If it be, the tyrant ought to be deposed with every appearance of publicity. Nothing can be more improper than for an affair, interesting to the general weal, to be conducted as if it were an act of darkness and shame. It is an ill lesson we read to mankind, when a proceeding, built upon the broad basis of general justice, is permitted to shrink from public scrutiny. The pistol and the dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue. To proscribe all violence, and neglect no means of information and impartiality, is the most effectual security we can have, for an issue conformable to reason and truth.
Force | Man | Mind | Office | Right | Sense | Suffering | Truth | Wrong |
Day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, and night doth nightly make grief's length seem stronger. Sonnet 28
God himself has no right to be a tyrant.
Accident | Argument | Boldness | Censure | Deliberation | Earth | Excellence | Force | Man | Morality | Ostentation | Principles | Property | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Right | Sense | Will | Excellence | Deliberation |
Few things have contributed more to undermine the energy and virtue of the human species, than the supposition that we have a right, as it has been phrased, to do what we will with our own. It is thus that the miser, who accumulates to no end that which diffused would have conduced to the welfare of thousands, that the luxurious man, who wallows in indulgence and sees numerous families around him pining in beggary, never fail to tell us of their rights, and to silence animadversion and quiet the censure of their own minds, by observing "that they came fairly into possession of their wealth, that they owe no debts, and that of consequence no man has authority to enquire into their private manner of disposing of that which appertains to them." We have in reality nothing that is strictly speaking our own. We have nothing that has not a destination prescribed to it by the immutable voice of reason and justice; and respecting which, if we supersede that destination, we do not entail upon ourselves a certain portion of guilt.
Sense |
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
To learn from experience, we must remember it, and for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.
For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague?
Important | Individual | Life | Life | Philosophy | Sense |