This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.
Eternity |
A sparrow in the hand is better than a cock on the roof. (It is better to be content with what we have or can easily get than to lose it by trying to get something better, as this may never happen)
The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.
S.G. Tallentyre, nom de plume for Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!
Children | Joy | Life | Life | People | Superstition | Tenderness | Time |
Saint-John Perse, first Saint-Leger Leger, pseudonyms of Alexis Leger
Happy birds, ah, may they extend towards us, from one shore to the other of heaven's ocean, that huge arc of painted wings that will assist and encircle us! May they bear the full honor of it among us by strength of soul!
A little boy and a little girl were looking at a picture of Adam and Eve. "Which is Adam and which is Eve?" said one. "I do not know," said the other, "but I could tell if they had their clothes on."
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Such is the constitution of man, that labor may be styled its own reward. - Nor will any external incitements be requisite if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.
Happy | Life | Life | Little | Nature | Nothing | Youth | Youth |
Sholem Asch, born Szalom Asz, also written Shalom Asch
Without a love of humankind there is no love of God.
Waste |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Object |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
Meaning |
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Oh, how wonderful it will be! I am coming with money and staying a long time and bringing something beautiful for you and then go on to Paris and become a great scholar and then come back to Vienna with a huge, enormous halo, and then we will soon get married, and I will cure all the incurable nervous cases and through you I shall be healthy and I will go on kissing you till you are strong and gay and happy — and if they haven't died, they are still alive today.
Evil |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The ego is not master in its own house.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.
Joy | Marriage | Pleasure | Self | Weakness | Woman | Child | Happiness |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view, until he had either fathomed it, or convinced himself that his data were insufficient. It was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed, and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features. So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still between his lips, the smoke still curled upwards, and the room was full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of shag which I had seen upon the previous night. 'Awake, Watson?' he asked. 'Yes.' 'Game for a morning drive?' 'Certainly.' 'Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the stable-boy sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out.
Mortal |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.
Aid | Authenticity | Comfort | Faith | Giving | Man | Praise | Truth | Unhappiness | War | Woman | Yielding | Victim |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.
Atomic bomb | Heart | Humanity | Opposition | Plan | Proletariat | Woman |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
Accounts are not quite settled between us, said she, with a passion that equaled my own. I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.