This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
While there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
Now King Alexander is driving down the familiar streets, curiously unguarded, in a curiously antique car. It can be seen from his attempt to make his stiff hand supple, from a careless flash of his careful black eyes, it can be seen that he is taking the cheers of the crowd with a childish seriousness. It is touching, like a girl putting full faith in the compliments that are paid to her at a ball.
Faith |
I am not accustomed to pay fulsome compliments to the English, by telling them that they are superior to all the world; but this I can say, that they do not deserve the name of cowards.
No doubt but ye are the People - your throne is above the King's. / Whoso speaks in your presence must say acceptable things.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.
The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
The school is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclopedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, by republicans agreeable to the police; the school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its unbroken girdle of walls, Homeric and Virgilian antiquity traded upon by official and licensed literati — a sort of China calling itself Greece; the school is, summed up in one concretion which forms part of public order, all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferules of the teaching friars, all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all the metaphysics of partisans, all the justice of bureaucrats, all the old age of dapper young men bereft of their virility, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of censer-bearers, all the independence of flunkeys, all the certitudes of the short-sighted and of base souls. The school is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclopedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, by republicans agreeable to the police; the school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its unbroken girdle of walls, Homeric and Virgilian antiquity traded upon by official and licensed literati — a sort of China calling itself Greece; the school is, summed up in one concretion which forms part of public order, all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferules of the teaching friars, all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all the metaphysics of partisans, all the justice of bureaucrats, all the old age of dapper young men bereft of their virility, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of censer-bearers, all the independence of flunkeys, all the certitudes of the short-sighted and of base souls.
Scholar |
To be contented,--what, indeed, is it? Is it not to be satisfied,--to hope for nothing, to aspire to nothing, to strive for nothing,--in short to rest in inglorious ease, doing nothing for your country, for your own or others' material, intellectual, or moral improvement, satisfied with the condition in which you or they are placed? Such a state of feeling may do very well where nature has fixed an inseparable and ascertained barrier,--a "thus far, shalt thou go and no farther,"--to our wishes, or where we are troubled by ills past remedy. In such cases it is the highest philosophy not to fret or grumble, when, by all our worrying and self-teasing, we cannot help ourselves a jot or tittle, but only aggravate and intensify an affliction that is incurable. To soothe the mind down into patience is then the only resource left us, and happy is he who has schooled himself thus to meet all reverses and disappointments. But in the ordinary circumstances of life this boasted virtue of contentment.
Acquaintance | Man | Nothing |