This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
If our belief is passionate enough, the river comes to us and in whatever form the passionate belief makes possible. Belief is causative and passion is formative. Passionate belief is the chaotic attractor that lifts chaos into its particular order.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.
Passion | Sensuality |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Almost all men are born with every passion to some extent, but there is hardly a man who has not a dominant passion to which the others are subordinate. Discover this governing passion in every individual; and when you have found the master passion of a man, remember never to trust to him where that passion is concerned.
Individual | Man | Men | Passion | Trust |
Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel
Life’s meaning rests in the eye of the beholder and in our constant desire to approach perfection. Life is so immense and complex that there is no one truth, only the rule of destiny... We do not choose life; life chooses us. Yet we try to follow our destiny, our passion our drive. We must live every minute as if it is our first and our last... The meaning of life lies in our desire to help others... Earthly life is an eternal miracle. In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand.
Desire | Destiny | Eternal | Eternity | Grace | Life | Life | Meaning | Passion | Perfection | Rule | Truth |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion too!
Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.
The irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred - that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love.
Beauty | Desire | Enjoyment | Force | Love | Opinion | Passion | Right |
When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs... and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song, in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul.
Life | Life | Man | Melancholy | Music | Passion | Play | Soul | Spirit | Waste |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone... Reason is immortal, all else mortal.
‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Books | Good | Heart | Mind | Passion | Sensibility | Thought | Thought |
The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul caused by the spirits which dispose it to wish for the future the things which it represents to itself as agreeable. Thus we do not only desire the presence of the absent good, but also the conservation of the present, and further, the absence of evil, both of that which we already have, and of that which we believe we might experience in time to come.
Absence | Agitation | Conservation | Desire | Evil | Experience | Future | Good | Passion | Present | Soul | Time |