This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
The exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence, much less can the utmost efforts of incorporated mind reach the summits of speculative virtue.
Every goal, every action, every thought, every feeling one experiences, whether it be consciously or unconsciously known, is an attempt to increase one's level of peace of mind.
Ability | Age | Appreciation | Experience | Life | Life | Music | People | Poetry | Rest | Time | Words | Appreciation | Child |
Through the seas of dreams and the seas of fantasies, through the seas of solitudes and vacancies, and through myself, the deepest of the seas, I strive to thee, Nirvana.
Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins
In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction.
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement,
Aesthetic | Body | Expectation | Famous | Looks | Progress | Search | Expectation |
Natural selection can only produce adaptation to immediately surrounding (and changing) environments. No feature of such local adaptation should yield any expectation of general progress (however such a vague term be defined). Local adaptation may as well lead to anatomical simplification as to greater complexity. As an adult, the famous parasite Sacculina, a barnacle by ancestry, looks like a formless bag of reproductive tissue attached to the underbelly of its crab host (with ‘roots’ of equally formless tissue anchored within the body of the crab itself)—a devilish device to be sure (at least by our aesthetic standards), but surely less anatomically complex than a barnacle on the bottom of your boat, waving its legs through the water in search of food.
History | Question | Search | Style | Will | Writing | Victim |
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
Evolution | Knowledge | Search | Understand |
Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé
My dream ascend unto thee: this already rare clarity of a heart that thought, I think I'm alone in my home monotone And all around me, living in idolatry On a mirror that reflects its calm sleep Herodias in clear diamond look ...
As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change... There’s a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.
Beginning | Better | Confidence | Discovery | Optimism | Search | Thought | Uncertainty | Will | Theoretical | Discovery | Govern | Thought |
Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim
One of my favorite songs is "Something's Coming". It was written in less than 48 hours during early West Side Story rehearsals. The actor playing Tony just didn't have the kind of "weight" that made you want to follow his adventures. But he could sing a 2/4 song better than anybody. So I wrote the song thinking it would give him an opportunity to establish himself on the stage. And give him confidence. And then he would give the rest of the company confidence ... and it worked.
Poetry |
People who boast about their IQ are losers.
Challenge | Search | Understanding | Will |
There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.
You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.
There might finally emerge a human animal of rare sensitivity whose curiosity could sense the existence of environments no longer physical, where the adaption required of all the species was a subtle change of consciousness.
Adventure | Church | Conquest | Man | Politics | Public | Reality | Search | Will | World | Think |
Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
Books follow morals, and not morals books.