This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no gene for such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. […] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts.
Comfort | Discovery | Lying | Nature | Waiting | World | Discovery |
He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.
Adventure | Contempt | Cruelty | Eternal | Excitement | Experience | Little | Man | Men | Observation | Passion | Past | Plenty | Present | Success | Waiting | Wife | Will | Youth | Cruelty | Youth |
Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
Liberalism: for every complicated problem there exists both an intellectual and a moral solution and they coincide.
Assurance makes most for your comfort, but holiness makes most for God's honor...Assurance is the daughter of holiness...The surest and shortest way to assurance is to wrestle and contend with God for holiness...
History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.
Thomas Dewar, Lord Dewar, fully Thomas Robert "Tommy" Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar
We have a great regard for old age when it is bottled.
Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring.
Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the wood with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer. I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with. Like everybody else. I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world. Then I’m in the real world – I’m on the beam. Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right. When I’m slipping, I say: he, this is interesting. It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me..
Waiting |
But all they want to do Is tie the poem to a chair with rope And torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose To find out what it really means.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
I have often said in answer to inquiries as to how I got away with kidding some of our public men, that it was because I liked all of them personally, and that if there was no malice in your heart there could be none in your Gags, and I have always said I never met a man I didn’t like.
Waiting |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The one that's out always looks the best.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Appearance | Waiting |
Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind.Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle… This state of affairs is best described by saying that all particles are basically nothing but different stationary states of one and the same stuff. Thus even the three basic building-stones have become reduced to a single one. There is only one kind of matter but it can exist in different discrete stationary conditions.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
First, O songs, for a prelude, lightly strike on the stretch'd tympanum, pride and joy in my city, how she led the rest to arms—how she gave the cue, how at once with lithe limbs, unwaiting a moment, she sprang; (O superb! O Manhattan, my own, my peerless! O strongest you in the hour of danger, in crisis! O truer than steel!) How you sprang! how you threw off the costumes of peace with indifferent hand; how your soft opera-music changed, and the drum and fife were heard in their stead; how you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude songs of soldiers,) How Manhattan drum-taps led.