This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Joining in the amusements of others is, in our social state, the next thing to sympathy in their distresses, and even the slenderest bond that holds society together should rather be strengthened than snapt." - Walter Savage Landor
"The monument of the greatest man should be only a bust and a name. - If the name alone is insufficient to illustrate the bust, let them both perish." - Walter Savage Landor
"Failing yet gracious, Slow pacing, soon homing, A patriarch that strolls Through the tents of his children, The sun as he journeys His round on the lower Ascents of the blue, Washes the roofs And the hillsides with clarity." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
"Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"O tell me the truth about love!" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"For the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher’s knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb. First came an elaborate mouse-gray vehicle of Belgian make, with fat autoid tires and luxurious springs, so large that it could not enter our puny elevator. It rolled on sidewalks in a slow stately mystery, with the trapped baby inside lying supine, well covered with down, silk and fur; only his eyes moved, warily, and sometimes they turned upward with one swift sweep of their showy lashes to follow the receding of branch-patterned blueness that flowed away from the edge of the half-cocked hood of the carriage, and presently he would dart a suspicious glance at my face to see if the teasing trees and sky did not belong, perhaps to the same order of things as did rattles and parental humor. There followed a lighter carriage, and in this, as he spun along, he would tend to rise, straining at his straps; clutching at the edges; standing there less like the groggy passenger of a pleasure boat than like an entranced scientist in a spaceship; surveying the speckled skeins of a live, warm world; eyeing with philosophic interest the pillow he had managed to throw overboard; falling out himself when a strap burst one day. Still later he rode in one of those small contraptions called strollers; from initial springy and secure heights the child came lower and lower, until, when he was about one and a half, he touched ground in front of the moving stroller by slipping forward out of his seat and beating the sidewalk with his heels in anticipation of being set loose in some public garden. A new wave of evolution started to swell, gradually lifting him again from the ground, when, for his second birthday, he received a four-foot-long, silver-painted Mercedes racing car operated by inside pedals, like an organ, and in this he used to drive with a pumping, clanking noise up and down the sidewalk of the Kurfurstendamm while from open windows came the multiplied roar of a dictator still pounding his chest in the Neander valley we had left far behind." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence." - Vera Mary Brittain
"Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives." - Victor Hugo
"Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity." - Victor Hugo
"To be a saint is the exception to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. Sin is a gravitation." - Victor Hugo
"But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Praise the virtues of fearlessness. A truly fearless person embraces even death without any kind of hesitation." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"The thundering of clouds which have spent all their water does not produce any rain. But the really valiant do not roar in vain; they show their valor in action also." - Valmiki NULL
"All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one]." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms. As You Like It. Act ii. Sc. 7." - William Shakespeare
"And that which should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. Macbeth Act v, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel What 'tis to love? How want of love tormenteth?" - William Shakespeare
"As a man thinketh our remedies in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven." - William Shakespeare
"Bashful sincerity and comely love." - William Shakespeare
"Be patient, for the world is broad and wide." - William Shakespeare
"Besides, you know Prosperity's the very bond of love, Whose fresh complexion and whose heart together Affliction alters. The Winter's Tale (Camillo at IV, iv)" - William Shakespeare
"Boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny. It hath been th' untimely emptying of the happy throne and fall of many kings. Macbeth, Act iv, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"But virtue, as it never will be moved, though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, so lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7" - William Shakespeare
"CRESSIDA: My lord, will you be true? TROILUS: Who, I? Alas, it is my vice, my fault: Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion, I with great truth catch mere simplicity; whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns, with truth and plainness I do wear mine bare. Fear not my truth: the moral of my wit is plain and true; there's all the reach of it. Troilus and Cressida, Act iii, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare
"The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation." - William James
"There is a wide difference between general acquaintance and companionship. You may salute a man and exchange compliments with him daily, yet know nothing of his character, his inmost tastes and feelings." - William Matthews
"Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; and now I'll do 't: and so he goes to heaven; and so am I reveng'd." - William Shakespeare
"O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; no more of that." - William Shakespeare
"O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)" - William Shakespeare
"Only your love is the enemy. You are you, but you're a Montesco. Is a Montesco? It is not hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any part of the body. Change the name! What is a name? What we call pink, another name would have the same flavor. If Romeo was not called Romeo, conserve their very perfection without that title. Romeo, rejects this name is not a part of you and takes me to change me." - William Shakespeare
"Patience is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts." - William Shakespeare
"Plague on't, an I thought he had been valiant, and so cunning in fence. I'd have seen him damned ere I'd have challenged him." - William Shakespeare
"Your Dollar is your only Word, the wrath of it your only fear. You build it altars tall enough to make you see, but your are blind; you cannot leave it long enough to look before you or behind." - Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"Foolish indeed are those who trust to fortune." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
"When you have a good history of doing good things, it will come back to you." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Sir, I desire you do me right and justice, and to bestow your pity on me; for I am a most poor woman and a stranger, born out of your dominions: having here no judge indifferent, nor no more assurance of equal friendship and proceeding. Alas, sir, in what have I offended you? What cause hath my behavior given to your displeasure that thus you should proceed to put me off and take your good grace from me? Heaven witness, I have been to you a true and humble wife, at all times to your will conformable, even in fear to kindle your dislike, yea, subject to your countenance--glad or sorry as I saw it inclined. When was the hour I ever contradicted your desire or made it not mine too? Or which of your friends have I not strove to love, although I knew he were mine enemy? What friend of mine that had to him derived your anger, did I continue in my liking? nay, gave notice he was from thence discharged? Sir, call to mind that I have been your wife in this obedience upward of twenty years, and have been blest with many children by you. If in the course and process of this time you can report, and prove it too, against mine honor aught, my bond to wedlock, or my love and duty against your sacred person, in God's name turn me away, and let the foul'st contempt shut door upon me, and so give me up to the sharp'st kind of justice. Please you, sir, the king your father was reputed for a prince most prudent, of an excellent and unmatched wit and judgment. Ferdinand, my father, King of Spain, was reckoned one the wisest prince that there had reigned by many a year before. It is not to be questioned that they had gathered a wise council to them of every realm that did debate this business, who deemed our marriage lawful. Wherefore I humbly beseech you, sir, to spare me till I may be by my friends in Spain advised, whose counsel I will implore. If not, i' th' name of God, your pleasure be fulfilled! Henry VIII, Act ii, Scene 4" - William Shakespeare
"So will I turn her virtue into pitch, and out of her own goodness make the net that shall enmesh them all." - William Shakespeare
"Speak of the one that loves not wisely but too well." - William Shakespeare