This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"When restraint and courtesy are added to strength, the latter becomes irresistible." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
"By a union courtesy and talent an adversary may be made to grace his own defeat, as the sandal-tree perfumes the hatchet that cuts it down." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
"I think a great many marriages would be saved if people would behave toward one another with the same courtesy that they would extend to someone whom they really didn't know as well as a marriage necessarily implies. ... It's not very easy to do, but it is surely easier to do than to haggle and nag and fight and bitch and yelp at one another as you hear a lot of married people doing ... They seem to feel that the familiarity of affection permits anything, including insult." - Robertson Davies
"The past is only partly irrecoverable. The clerisy should accord it at least as much courtesy as they offer to the future." - Robertson Davies
"Ever since I was a teenager delivering newspapers (for seven straight years), I have tried not to lose a single customer. I treated each one like the most important person in the world and delivered each paper as if I were delivering it to the front door of the Governor’s mansion. The key to succeeding with a paper route and the restaurant business, I would later learn, is to take care of the customer. Whether on the paper route or in my restaurants, I have found that the most effective way of promoting my business didn’t cost me anything but a little kindness to my customers." - S. Truett Cathy
"A woman who intentionally destroys a fetus is guilty of murder. And we do not even talk about the fine distinction as to its being completely formed or unformed." - Saint Basil, aka Basil of Caesarea, Saint Basil the Great NULL
"All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. humility gives it its power. if you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. if you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them." - Stephen Mitchell
"And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter—just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time." - Wendell Berry
"Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Because I threw our look with a gray question mark in your eyes. Oh, no, no empeces again (incredulity, exasperation). Well never dignabas to believe that I could feel the desire, without specific intent-to sink my face in your plaid skirt, my love. The fragility of your bare arms ... How I longed to wrap those arms, and your four limpid lovely-curled-a colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands and stretch the skin back from your temples and slanted eyes and kiss your ... Please leave me alone, will you?, You said. My God, leave me alone. And I got up from the floor while you looked twitching his face in a deliberate imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am a miserable, no matter, continue with my miserable story." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"And then it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons." - William Shakespeare
"And thus I clothe my naked villany with old odd ends, stol'n out of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (Gloucester at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare
"BENEDICK: Would you buy her, that you enquire after her? CLAUDIO: Can the world buy such a jewel?" - William Shakespeare