This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
ORSINO: How dost thou like this tune? VIOLA: It gives a very echo to the seat where love is throned.
Perfection | Praise |
Prince Shōtoku, born Shotoku Taishi, aka Prince Umayado or Prince Kamitsumiya
Good faith is the foundation of right. In everything let there be good faith, for if the lord and the vassal keep faith with one another, what cannot be accomplished? If the lord and the vassal do not keep faith with each other, everything will end in failure.
Antiquity | Duty | Man | Men | Office | Praise | Right | Sound | Will | Wise |
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
On the third day after the birth of a girl the ancients observed three customs: first to place the baby below the bed; second to give her a potsherd [a piece of broken pottery] with which to play; and third to announce her birth to her ancestors by an offering. Now to lay the baby below the bed plainly indicated that she is lowly and weak, and should regard it as her primary duty to humble herself before others. To give her potsherds with which to play indubitably signified that she should practice labor and consider it her primary duty to be industrious. To announce her birth before her ancestors clearly meant that she ought to esteem as her primary duty the continuation of the observance of worship in the home.
Beauty | Defects | Duty | Excellence | Fame | Father | Glory | Husband | Praise | Reputation | Will | Excellence | Friendship | Beauty |
Through the years of my trance communications and research, two control personalities... have always been identified with my work, and they have never ceased to maintain their independent and separate selves. It is interesting to note that they have always welcomed every form of scientific investigation into the nature of their own being and the mechanisms of my supernormal functioning; but up to the present any efforts to dislodge them or to reduce them to aspects of my own consciousness have led to no change in their attitude, position, or state of being. The control personalities still maintain the roles they have always played in relation to me, since my trance work began. I have reached a point in my development where I can live in harmony with myself and at peace with those personalities, for I am now able to regard them as the finer aspects of my true self. Whatever their origin may be, I do not, at present, have at my command the means of knowing; but for the time being, I am content to accept the controls as aspects of a constructive principle upon which my entire life has been built.
Gratitude | Heart | Individual | Love | Need | People | Position | Praise | Responsibility | Will | Work | Afraid | Leadership |
You don’t have to know a philosopher’s every syllable to know why he rubs you the wrong way. You may know it best after a few of his sentences, and les and less well after that. The important thing is to see his web and move away before you tear it.
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being.
Achievement | Beauty | Conduct | Good | Harmony | Important | Thought | Beauty | Old | Thought |
A man who cries all night until destroyed, and the next morning continued the day with a smile called Woman.
ROMEO: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk'st of nothing. Mercutio: True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy, which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconstant than the wind, who wooes even now the frozen bosom of the north, and, being anger'd, puffs away from thence, turning his face to the dew-dropping south. BENVOLIO: This wind you talk of blows us from ourselves; supper is done, and we shall come too late.
Love |
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
There's not a crime but takes its proper change out still in crime if once rung on the counter of this world.
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).
Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What's this, Aurora Leigh, you write so of the poets and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, exaggerators of the sun and moon, and soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,— the only speakers of essential truth, opposed to relative, comparative, and temporal truths... the only teachers who instruct mankind, from just a shadow on a charnel-wall.
Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
Good words, I replied. But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember you don't forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.
Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Enough | Imagination | Little | People | Praise | Wonder | Blessed |