This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Imitation | Individual | Inspiration | Land | Language | Light | Man | Means | Necessity | Reason | Submission | Time | Unique | Waste |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.
Heart |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.
Change | Difficulty | Position | Revolution | Time | Old |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Beauty | Good | Heart | Literature | Mind | Unity | Will | Worth | Beauty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of eachother's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
Childhood | Duty | Heart | Life | Life | Lust | Melancholy | Mortal | Nothing | Sense | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Our labor preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
Heart |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
Death | Detachment | Heart | Love | Order | Peace | Sanity | Thought | Woman | World | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs that are able to contain immortal images, spirals of thought, new worlds with live people who talk, cry and laugh. We accept it with such simplicity that somehow, by the very act of acceptance and insensitive routinely undo the work of all time, the story of the gradual development of poetical description and construction of the hominid Browning, the caveman to Keats. What would happen if we awaken one day, all of us, and we discovered that we were totally unable to read? I want you to dazzle not only with what they read, but with the miracle that something is likely to be read.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Darkness | Day | Death | Ends | Life | Life | Panic | Progress | Suicide | Thought | Time | Afraid | Old | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Van sealed the letter, found his Thunderbolt pistol in the place he had visualized, introduced one cartridge into the magazine, and translated it into its chamber. Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened - or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the fakes serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. We do not pray to him at all, said the reverend sage. We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.
Affectation | Good | Heart | Knowledge | Sense | Thought | Will | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
Heart |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
And sometimes there is relief, sometimes there is new inner energy, and one stands up after it; till at last, someday, one perhaps doesn't stand up any more, que soit, but that is nothing extraordinary, and I repeat, in my opinion, such is the common
Heart |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
Unless a man believes in himself and makes a total commitment to his career and puts everything he has into it – his mind, his body, his heart – what’s life worth to him?
Heart | Influence | Man | Men | Personality |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well... we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
There is something good in men that really yearn for discipline.