This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death ... and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next. Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 2
Be absolute for death; either death or life shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life, if I do lose thee, I do lose a thing that none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, servile to all the skyey influences, that dost this habitation, where thou keep'st hourly afflict; merely, thou art death's fool; for him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, and yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble; for all the accommodations that thou bear'st are nurs'd by baseness. Thou art by no means valiant; for thou dost fear the soft and tender fork of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself for thou exist'st on many a thousand grains that issue out of dust. Happy thou art not; for what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get; and what thou hast, forgett'st. Thou art not certain; for thy complexion shifts to strange effects, after the moon. If thou art rich, thou art poor; for, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, and death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; for thine own bowels, which do call thee sire, the mere effusion of thy proper loins, do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum, for ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, to make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this that bears the name of life? Yet in this life lie hid more thousand deaths: yet death we fear, that makes these odds all even. Measure for Measure, Act iii, Scene 1
But man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assur'd; his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep. Measure for Measure. Act ii. Sc. 2.
Being once chafed, he cannot be reigned again to temperance; then he speaks what's in his heart, and that is there which looks with us to break his neck. Coliolanus, Act iii, Scene 3
Cold indeed, and labor lost: then farewell heat, and welcome frost!
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou are not conquered. Beauty's ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, and death's pale flag is not advanced there. Romeo and Juliet, Act v, Scene 3
Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
There is a lust in man no charm can tame: Of loudly publishing his neighbor's shame: On eagles wings immortal scandals fly, while virtuous actions are born and die.
Liberty is one of the best of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed.
Accident | Consideration | Contradiction | Control | Experiment | Father | Indulgence | Little | Man | Means | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Persuasion | Power | Trust | Will | Happiness |
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
Individual | Power |
A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about.
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