This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Saul Steinberg, fully Saul Erik Steinberg
The life of the creative person is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult... in the end working is good because it is the last refuge of the person who wants to be amused.
He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims, - with immortal longings, with thoughts which sweep the heavens and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
Jung equates the unconscious with the soul, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable world, protected form all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of a burning enthusiasm. The soul, always drawn inward, seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experience of the underworld.
Conformity | Contemplation | Enlightenment | Enthusiasm | Experience | Life | Life | Pleasure | Soul | Wants | World | Contemplation | Intellect |
William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Man is free the moment he wants to be.
To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be devout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness.
Desire | Devotion | God | Heart | Humility | Man | Sense | Soul | Wants | Will | World | God |
Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.
A person who wants approval is disturbed and irritated if someone questions his attitudes and opinions. But a wise man seeks truth and therefore feels pleasure if someone raises objections since this helps him correct his mistakes.
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
Hypothesis | Wants |
Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
Fran Lebowitz, fully Frances Ann "Fran" Lebowitz
Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.