This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Better | Day | Death | Little | Mind | Mystery | Need | Reason | Size | Soul | Will | Think |
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
Joy in spite of everything is yanking the bell rope despite physical affliction — it has become my Quasi Motto. One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor.
But wherefore do not you a mightier way make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time? And fortify yourself in your decay with means more blessed than my barren rhyme? To give away yourself, keeps yourself still, and you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill. Sonnet 16
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BENVOLIO: Part, fools! Put up your swords; you know not what you do. (Tybalt enters) TYBALT: What, art thou drawn among these hartless hinds? Turn thee, Benvolio; look upon thy death. BENVOLIO: I do but keep the peace: put up thy sword, or manage it to part these men with me. TYBALT: What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. Have at thee, coward! Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 1
But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry in what I further shall intend to do, by heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint and strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs: the time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far than empty tigers or the roaring sea. Romeo and Juliet, Act v, Scene 3
Q: What is your single most important cooking tool? A: A spoon. The most indispensable kitchen tool is also the most basic, and often the most misused. I'm particular about the spoons used at both Blue Hills — we use one kind, and I think it's the right-size spoon for plating and the right-size spoon for tasting. It's not too big; it's not too small. I want everyone to have the same consistency, because the spoon — whether you're flipping a piece of fish, or you're stirring rice, or you're tasting a sauce — becomes an extension of your hand.
Conversation | Enough | Hate | Life | Life | Need | Truth | Will | Afraid |
Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL
Universal responsibility is the real key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace, the equitable use of natural resources, and through concern for future generations, the proper care of the environment.
Heart | Need | Philosophy |
Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average.
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
Eternal | Greatness | History | Individual | Life | Life | Need | Truth | Work | World |
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others.
Learn to live for your own sake and the service of God; and let nothing in the world be of any value with you but that which you can turn into a service to God, and a means of your future happiness.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may someday seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
Belief | Excitement | Good | Need | Nothing | Right | Sense | Wrong | Understand |