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
Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
Art | Beauty | Dawn | Doubt | Light | Literature | Nonsense | Sense | Yielding | Art | Beauty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.
Absolute | Day | Dreams | Little | Play | Pleasure | Sense | Work | World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy L and a long o. No, the first syllable should be as in lollipop, the L liquid and delicate, the lee not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in Dolores. My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname Haze, where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.
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 |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.
Earth | Enough | Impression | Life | Life | Nothing | Right | Sense |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. (The Vane Sisters)
Common Sense | Existence | Light | Mother | Panic | People | Sense | Time | World |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Common Sense | Sense |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This whole psychiatry is nothing else but a kind of microcosm of communism [...]. It would be better left to people their personal problems. For the question arises whether the problems are not the only thing in the world that people may have on the property?
Appetite | Awareness | Ceremony | Light | Reflection | Sense | Sound | Time | Awareness |
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 |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.
Energy | Love | Man | Mind | Mortal | Position | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Absurdity | Thought |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.
Cooperation | Goals | Risk | Sense | Wants | Will | Leader |
There have been superficial blendings, as spiritual groups take up social service work and social activists join religious organizations, but a real integration of social action and spirituality at a deep, innovative level has not yet happened to any significant degree. The history of human development has been fragmentary, and the majority of people have been content with the fragmentation. It has the sanction of society. Each fragment of society has its own set of values. Among many social activists, anger, hatred, violence, bitterness, and cynicism are accepted norms, even though the effectiveness of these motivations for peaceful living has been seriously put in doubt. And indifference to the needs of the poor has had shocking acceptance among generations of spiritual people who considered higher states of consciousness much more significant than the misery of the starving millions.
When we come face-to-face with the actualities of human and planetary suffering, what does the powerful moment of truth do to us? Do we retreat into the comforts of theories and defense mechanisms, or are we awakened at the core of our being? Awareness of misery, without defense structures, will naturally lead to action. The heart cannot witness misery without calling the being to action, without activating the force of love. We may not act on a global or national scale; it may be only on a community or neighborhood scale—but act, respond, we must. Social responsibility flowers naturally when we perceive the world without the involvement of the ego-consciousness. When we relate directly to suffering, we are led to understanding and spontaneous action—but when we perceive the world through the ego, we are cut off from direct relationship, from communion that stirs the deepest level of our being.
Action | Awareness | Oneness | Relationship | Sense | Will | Awareness |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.