This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction. For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire that owed their inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.
Body | Death | Desire | Inspiration | Love | Past | Power | Time | Will |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, Lady Blessington, born Margaret Power
There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world.
Desire |
Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym for Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.
Desire | Enough | Indifference | Love | Object | Riches | Riches | Understand |
In a culture whose media extols thinness as the great panacea that will bring happiness, sexuality, self-respect and social acceptance, they are blind to the insidious lies of the false goddess. Possessed by their own damaged instincts, and ironically driven by the same desire for power that their parents used in raising them, some children wolf down food, or reject it, or vomit it out. Whether that rejection of life is concretized in 200 pounds of armor, or 90 pounds of bone, or vomit in the toilet, the surest way out of the neurosis is to try to understand what food symbolizes in the individual psyche and why the energy is pulled in that direction.
Children | Culture | Desire | Energy | Individual | Life | Life | Parents | Power | Will | Understand |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born /a hundred million years /and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
Absence | Desire | Longing | Opportunity | Sense |
Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.
Desire | Destroy | Knowledge | Man | Mind | Passion | Perfection | Rule | Study | Taste | Tranquility | Think |
Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.
Desire |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution.
Desire | Imagination |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
The inner work is first of all the work of God's grace in the depth of the soul which subsequently distributes itself among the faculties of the soul, in that of Reason appearing as Belief, in that of Will as Love, and in that of Desire as Hope. When the Divine Light penetrates the soul, it is united with God as light with light. This is the light of faith. Faith bears the soul to heights unreachable by her natural senses and faculties.
Desire | Faith | God | Grace | Light | Reason | Soul | Will | Work | God |
Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
Desire |
Mechthild of Magdeburg, also Mechtild NULL
God has given all creatures the desire to seek and foster their own nature
Desire |
Energy always flows either toward hope, community, love, generosity, mutual recognition, and spiritual aliveness or it flows toward despair, cynicism, fear that there is not enough, paranoia about the intentions of others, and a desire to control.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.