This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes?
The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?
Contradiction | Man | Mortal | Nature | World |
In short, a private education seems the most natural method for the forming of a virtuous man; a public education for making a man of business. The first would furnish out a good subject for PlatoÂ’s republic, the latter a member for a community overrun with artifice and corruption.
Education | Means | Men | Nothing | Order | Reason | Service | Temper | Think |
Ælian, in his account of Zoilus, the pretended critic, who wrote against Homer and Plato, and thought himself wiser than all who had gone before him, tells us that this Zoilus had a very long beard that hung down upon his breast, but no hair upon his head, which he always kept close shaved, regarding, it seems, the hairs of his head as so many suckers, which, if they had been suffered to grow, might have drawn away the nourishment from his chin, and by that means have starved his beard.
A woman like me! What am I like that's different from you or any man
The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy.)
Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.
Reason |
The sweetest teaching did he introduce, concealing truth under untrue speech. The place he spoke of as the gods' abode was that by which he might awe humans most, — The place from which, he knew, terrors came to mortals and things advantageous in their wearisome life — The revolving heaven above, in which dwell the lightnings, and awesome claps of thunder, and the starry face of heaven, beautiful and intricate by that wise craftsman Time, — from which, too, the meteor's glowing mass speeds and wet thunderstorm pours forth upon the earth.
Man |