This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Good and bad fortune are found severally to visit those who have the most of the one or the other.
Everyone agrees that a secret should be kept intact, but everyone does not agree as to the nature and importance of secrecy. Too often we consult ourselves as to what we should say, what we should leave unsaid. There are few permanent secrets, and the scruple against revealing them will not last forever.
Conscience, though ever so small a worm while we live, grows suddenly into a serpent on our deathbed.
Pleasure |
Happiness is dependent on the taste, and not on things. It is by having what we like that we are made happy, not by having what others think desirable.
Pleasure |
It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.
Never was any considerable good or evil done without producing its like. We imitate good actions through emulation; and bad ones through the evil of our nature, which shame conceals, but example sets at liberty.
The extreme pleasure we take in talking of ourselves should make us fear that we give very little to those who listen to us.
There is no accident so disastrous that a clever man cannot derive some profit from it; nor any so fortunate that a fool cannot turn it to his disadvantage.
We often do good in order that we may do evil with impunity.
Pleasure |
What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
Oswald: Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not. Kent: Fellow, I know thee. Oswald: What dost thou know me for? Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition. King Lear, Act ii, Scene 2
Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
Advice | Literature | Nothing | Safe |
True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.
Comfort | Consolation | Insult | Knowing | Pleasure | World | Insult |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
Well, we never expected this! they all say. No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether! How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.
Attention | Beginning | Enlightenment | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Nothing | Order | People | Wishes | World | Old |