This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Evils... can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the Gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the earthly nature and this mortal sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy and just and wise.
Earth | God | Good | Heaven | Mortal | Nature | Necessity | Wise |
Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
Ability and necessity dwell near each other.
If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to assert liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. We are sure, though we know not how, that necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.
Character | Duty | Fate | Individual | Liberty | Necessity | Power | Spirit | World |
A person may sometimes have a clear conscience simply because his head is empty.
Satchel Paige, fully Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige
Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of war.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
Aesthetic | Appreciation | Art | Contrast | Criticism | Meaning | Necessity | Order | Work | Appreciation | Art | Value |
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt; its essence is love: it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us.
Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.
Ability | Consciousness | Desire | Man | Necessity | Nothing |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.