This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
The thinking heart of the barracksÂ…
It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
Both reading and writing are experiences — lifelong — in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
There are rational proofs by which we can know with certitude that God exists; but the certitude of faith, which is based on the infallibility of the word of God, is infinitely more reliable than all knowledge acquired by natural reason alone, no matter how evident it may be. In matters of revelation, error is absolutely impossible because the source of the knowledge of faith is God Himself, who is the Truth.
A single word, which depicts nothing, would not have been sufficiently expressive to have immediately succeeded the mode of speaking by action: this was a language so well proportioned to rude capacities, that it could not be supplied by articulate sounds, without accumulating expressions one upon the other.
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
Character | Good | Pleasure | Speech | Thought | World | Think | Thought |
Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
He (a new philosopher) still needs to be taught, not this time philosophy, but to philosophize.
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless.
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
This is, I say, the time for all good men not to go to the aid of their party, but to come to the aid of their country.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie answers questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant aperçus (the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.
Words |
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy
The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.