This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
Nothing more unqualifies a man to act iwth prudence, than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.
Character | Guilt | Man | Misfortune | Nothing | Prudence | Prudence | Shame | Misfortune |
No greater shame to man than inhumanity.
Character | Inhumanity | Man | Shame |
He that has a "spirit of detail" will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university. Such an one is minute and particular. He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life. Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence.
Better | Business | Character | Events | Life | Life | Little | Spirit | Trifles | Will | Business | Happiness |
Educate your children of self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.
Character | Children | Control | Evil | Future | Habit | Passion | Prejudice | Self | Self-control | Society | Will |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
Wine-drinking is the mother of all mischief, the root of crimes, the spring of vices, the whirlwind of the brain, the overthrow of the sense, the tempest of the tongue, the ruin of the body, the shame of life, the stain of honesty, and the plague and corruption of the soul.
Body | Corruption | Honesty | Life | Life | Mother | Sense | Shame | Soul | Wisdom |
One day when famine had wrought great misery in Russia a beggar, weak, emaciated, all but starved to death, asked for alms. Tolstoy searched his pockets for a coin but discovered that he was without as much as a copper piece. Taking the beggar's worn hands between his own, he said: "Do not be angry with me brother; I have nothing with me." The thin, lined face of the beggar became illumined as from some inner light, and he whispered in reply: "But you called me brother - that was a great gift."
Catherine Bowen, née Catherine Shober Drinker
The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.
Courage | Ideals | Life | Life | Persistence | Shame | Success | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Words | Afraid |
Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food an raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty - the shame of being though poor - it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
By adversity are wrought the greatest works of admiration, and all the fair examples of renown, out of distress and misery are grown.
Admiration | Adversity | Distress | Wisdom |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity form the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”
Beginning | Dispute | Humanity | Kill | Man | Men | Nothing | Time | Will | Wisdom | Worship |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.
Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |
Life itself is experienced as an endless celebration, an eternal dance and rhythm, continuously pulsating sound. To the initiate, life is a vibrating, harmoniously synchronized melody. The shame works with this feeling of sharing the rhythm of the cosmic dance of fields of energy that are the source, the matrix of all matter.
Energy | Eternal | Life | Life | Melody | Shame | Sound | Wisdom |
If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what you respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.
God | Little | Love | Nature | Nothing | People | Respect | Sin | Study | Will | Wisdom | Respect | God | Think |