This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pope Agapet II, aka Pope Agapetus II NULL
When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults.
Affectation is an awkward and forced Imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the Beauty that accompanies what is natural.
Affectation | Beauty | Character | Imitation | Beauty |
Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
He only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God - which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness... for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God.
Blessedness | Cause | Enjoyment | God | Imitation | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | God | Blessed |
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man.
One of the characteristics of great drawing is the artist's wholehearted acceptance of his own style and character. It is as if the drawing says for the artist, "Here I am."
Acceptance | Character | Style | Wisdom |
Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy--its figures, its trees, or its palaces,--without a spot.
Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
Style |
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse.
Action | Character | Happy | Imitation | Life | Life | Qualities | Tragedy | Happiness |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis.
Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored.
Culture | Experience | Freedom | Fulfillment | Nothing | Order | Search | Self | Self-realization | Style | World |
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
Imitation | Impulse | Inferiority | Model | Resentment | Sense |