This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing
Cynicism | Entertainment | Experience | Good | Happy | Little | Method | Morality | Satire | Story | Style | Virtue | Virtue | Wickedness |
Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, that this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, that it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, that it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, that all is clean forever and forever,
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
The Taoist talk about vacuity is motivated by a desire for nourishing everlasting life, and the Buddhist talk about non-being is motivated by the desire to escape from the sorrowful sea of life and death. In both cases, a certain selfish idea has been added to the original substance [of the mind], thereby losing the true character of vacuity and obstructing the original substance [of the mind]. The Confucian sage merely returns to the true condition of innate knowledge of the good and does not attach to it any selfish desire.
Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
Buddhism claims to be free from attachment to and affliction by phenomenal things [dharma-characters], but actually the opposite is the case. The Buddhists are afraid of the burden in the relationship between father and son and therefore escape from it... In all cases, because the relationships between ruler and minister, father and son, and husband and wife involve attachment to phenomena, they have to escape from them. With us Confucians we accept the relationship between father and son and fulfill it with humanity as it deserves.
A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which the food comes.
Contradiction | Good | Harmony | Justification | Nothing | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
Those not ruled by the rudder will be ruled by the rocks.
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
Bible | Body | Fear | Grief | Harmony | Sense | Soul | Spirit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Work | World | Bible | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: Whom do you write for? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Virtue | Virtue | Friendship | Friends | Vice |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self - in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
Accomplishment | Honesty | Integrity | Virtue | Virtue |
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
Personal leadership exists only as the officers demonstrate it by superior courage, wider knowledge, quicker initiative, and a greater readiness to accept responsibility than those they lead.