This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.
Vice |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; where there is vanity, there will be folly.
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.
Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse. The offenders acquire impunity by increasing their ravaging.
Ignatius Loyola, aka Saint Ignatius of Loyola
O my God, teach me to be generous, teach me to serve you as I should, to give without counting the cost, to fight without fear of being wounded, to work without seeking rest, to labor without expecting any reward, but the knowledge that I am doing your most holy will.
Stanislaw Lec, fully Stanisław Jerzy Lec, born Baron Stanisław Jerzy de Tusch-Letz
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through. No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep believing, the dream that you wish will come true.
Perception | Right | Vice |
The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.
Day | Destroy | Earth | Enough | Experience | Extreme | Global | History | Hope | Journey | Light | Looks | Means | Method | Mission | Nature | Need | Nothing | Object | Past | People | Power | Principles | Reality | Reason | Rest | Right | Space | System | Time | Understanding | Universe | Will | Wonder | World | Child | Think |
To a large extent our difficulties are a difficulty of language. People fail to realize that language is multivalent and also, particularly, that when a person uses a word like ‘rights’, for the non-human world, they think ‘rights’ is a single continuum… ‘Rights’ is an analogous term. It is an analogous term. It is alike and different. Like a person says – “A tree has rights” – the tree doesn’t have human rights because human rights would be no good for a tree. A tree needs tree rights. Birds need bird rights. Plants need plant rights. This whole question of law and rights needs to recognize what we call the diversity within the continuity. It is a difference of quality, not of quantity. So, it is not that the humans have more or less. Humans don’t have more rights than birds do. They have different rights. So that it’s this capacity to recognize difference that pervades just an enormous amount of human affairs.
Attention | Life | Life | Little | Mission | Past | Reconciliation | Redemption | Relationship | Time |
The stupendous Fourth Estate, whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in?
Vice |
The artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted...
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each it’s true and due fulfillment.
Existence | Grief | Life | Life | Passion | Writing | Vice |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?
Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life.
Humility | Life | Life | Mission | Thought | Will | Thought |
The mature person realizes that life affirms itself most, not in acquiring things, but in giving time, efforts, strength, intelligence, and love to others. Here a different kind of dialectic of life and death begins to appear. The living drive, the vital satisfaction, by “ending” its trend to self-satisfaction and redirecting itself to and for others, transcends itself. It “dies” insofar as the ego is concerned, for the self is deprived of the immediate satisfactions which it could claim without being contested. Now it renounces these things, in order to give to others. Hence, life “dies” to itself in order to give itself away and thus affirms itself more maturely, more fruitfully, and more completely. We live in order to die to ourselves and give everything to others. …This “dying” to self in order to give to others is nothing more or less than a higher and more special affirmation of life. Such dying is the fruit of life, the evidence of mature and productive living. It is, in fact, the end or the goal of life.