This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hence, goes on the professor, definitions of happiness are interesting. I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: One of the best (we are still on definitions of happiness) was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.' Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe.
Enough | God | Hate | Heart | Little | Thought | God | Think | Thought |
I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like It were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me? But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel This is not, the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss. I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out... Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to vibrate with passion... It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.
Art | Change | Danger | Darkness | Doubt | Dreams | Grief | Guile | Hate | Heart | Hope | Liberty | Life | Life | Pain | Quiet | Reason | Suffering | Suspicion | Thankfulness | Trust | Truth | World | Danger | Art |
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood! But, till then--if you don't believe me, you don't know me--till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
He'll never let his friends be at ease, and he'll never be at ease himself!
Esteem | Hate | Impertinence | Love |
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; when free press is curtailed and every independent opinion gagged? Verily, poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?
Hate | Joy | Life | Life | Logic | Machines | Pride | Risk | Thought | Will | Thought |
In Kafka we have the modern mind, seemingly self-sufficient, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate real one – yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows Two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God.
Hate |
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Methods of production, standards of consumption, criteria of success or failure, systems of values, and behavior patterns establish themselves in poor countries which, being (doubtfully) appropriate only to conditions of affluence already achieved, fix the poor countries ever more inescapably in a condition of utter dependence on the rich.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; but I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
Let him come! I have seen them come before -- at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy! [General Wetjoen talking about the Boer War]
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death!
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Just the place to bury a crock of gold,' said Sebastian. 'I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
No one is ever holy without suffering.