This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding, ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure, ye noted it not mid your hope and your pleasure; there was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding, but daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.
Beauty | Desire | Humanity | Life | Life | Man | Men | Sense | Beauty |
I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Wow,' said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn't much else he could say. He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press. 'Wow.' The crowd turned their faces back toward him expectantly. He winked at Trillian, who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes at him. She knew what he was about to say and thought him a terrible show-off. 'That is really amazing.' he said. 'That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it.' A marvelous presidential quote, absolutely true to form. The crowd laughed appreciativley, the newsman gleefully punched buttons on their Sub-Etha News-Matics and the President grinned. As he grinned his heart screamed unbearably and he fingered the small Paralyso-Matic bomb that nestled quietly in his pocket. Finally he could bear it no more. He lifted his heads up to the sky, let out a wild whoop in major thirds, threw the bomb to the ground and ran forward through the sea of suddenly frozen beaming smiles.
Good |
The challenge of reporting is to continually come up with new information on the issues on which you’re reporting. This can be extremely difficult if not impossible when dealing with sudden emergencies. Most terrorist attacks fit this pattern. Initially, the media is blindsided by the event. Eyewitness reports start coming in, the vast majority of which are inaccurate. Media outlets don’t have the option to remain silent about breaking news, so having nothing else to talk about, they repeat the rumors. Unfortunately, they don’t realize that people take rumor as fact from mainstream news outlets, or they do realize it but feel they have plausible deniability by reporting rumors as rumor rather than fact.
Government | Right | Thought | Government | Thought |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give.
Generosity | Order |
Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.
Time |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
An attendant came up, bowing deeply. The white flowers far off yonder are known as 'evening faces, he said. A very human sort of name--and what a shabby place they have picked to bloom in.It was as the man said. The neighborhood was a poor one, chiefly of small houses. Some were leaning precariously, and there were evening faces at the sagging eaves. A hapless sort of flower. Pick one off for me, will you? The man went inside the raised gate and broke off a flower. A pretty little girl in long, unlined yellow trousers of raw silk came out through a sliding door that seemed too good for the surroundings. Beckoning to the man, she handed him a heavily scented white fan. Put it on this. It isn't much of a fan, but then it isn't much of a flower either.
Man | Order | Public | Resentment | Will |
No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed.
Change | Childhood | Life | Life | Religion | Sense | Time | Truth | Understanding | Woman | World |
But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
Conscience | Reading |
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).
This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.
Authority | Conscience | Doubt | Fear | Justice | Knowledge | Position | Public | Responsibility | Struggle | Terror | Guilty | Understand |
We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.
Misfortune | Misfortune |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.
Our institutions and conditions rest upon deep-seated ideas. To change those conditions and at the same time leave the underlying ideas and values intact means only a superficial transformation, one that cannot be permanent or bring real betterment. It is a change of form only, not of substance, as so tragically proven by Russia.
Discovery | Freedom | Man | Personality | Society | Work | Society | Discovery |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
I think there are ghosts that roam the world, I know. Stay always with me, in the form you want, fool me again! But the only thing you can do is leave me alone in this abyss where I cannot find you.