This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
An honest heart is not to be trusted with itself in bad company.
When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice--that is, until we have stopped saying It got lost, and say, I lost it.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.
Childhood | Individual | Religion |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us.
Care | Childhood | Children | Consolation | Insignificance | Life | Life | Men | Necessity | Need | Object | Position | Purpose | Purpose | Troubles | Will | Child |
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream.
Absolute | Abstract | Childhood | Contempt | Desire | Fighting | Ideas | Nothing | Order | Paradise | Reality | Suffering | World |
Our first impressions are to consider the Ascension of our Lord as the very greatest event connected with His appearance on earth. To our own mind, undoubtedly, nothing could be so solemn, so exalting, as the changing this life for another; the putting off mortality and putting on immortality; and all this we connect with the thought of the removal from earth to heaven.
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.
Florentine Ingratitude: Sir Joshua sent his own portrait to The birthplace of Michael Angelo, And in the hand of the simpering fool He put a dirty paper scroll, And on the paper, to be polite, Did ‘Sketches by Michael Angelo’ write. The Florentines said ‘’Tis a Dutch-English bore, Michael Angelo’s name writ on Rembrandt’s door.’ The Florentines call it an English fetch, For Michael Angelo never did sketch; 10 Every line of his has meaning, And needs neither suckling nor weaning. ’Tis the trading English-Venetian cant To speak Michael Angelo, and act Rembrandt: It will set his Dutch friends all in a roar To write ‘Mich. Ang.’ on Rembrandt’s door; But you must not bring in your hand a lie If you mean that the Florentines should buy. Giotto’s circle or Apelles’ line Were not the work of sketchers drunk with wine; Nor of the city clock’s running … fashion; Nor of Sir Isaac Newton’s calculation.
Angels | Childhood | Father | Heaven | Revolution | Spirit | War | Blessed | Forgive | Friends |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.
Childhood | Little | Observation | Talking | World |
All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman.
Childhood | Dreams | Growth | Happy | Little | Mind | Past | Power | Present | Spirit | Blessed |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.
Aims | Attainment | Childhood | Happy | Leisure | Life | Life | Little | Pleasure | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Rule | Will | Work | Happiness |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression -- that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of eachother's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
Childhood | Duty | Heart | Life | Life | Lust | Melancholy | Mortal | Nothing | Sense | Old |