This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
Land |
Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
I think the atmosphere of a Prom concert can change your life, in the best way. It's so deep, the feeling you have there. The audience is so close, and there are so many of them, that you feel they are almost embracing you.
Good |
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
Impression | Looks |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
Will |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs?as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as ?meaningless? are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.
I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
Bride |
The right man comes at the right time.
Government | Looks | Means | Opportunity | Safe | Worry | Government | Think |
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
Right conduct, truth, and beauty are only different aspects of what is fundamentally the same. Right conduct embodies co-ordinated wholeness, which can be, and often is, called beautiful. It also embodies truth, as standing for a true perception of the relations between different individuals. Similarly, truth as being essentially motivated, involves not only a true realization of co-ordinated relations, but also the furthering of them. In a similar way, beauty involves both truth or right perception and the co-ordinated wholeness which we find also in right conduct.
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
I have not been nourished by English Literature... for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ?mad?. . . but I don?t believe I am... I set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.
Light |