This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more... to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it... Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
The teacher of evil destroys the lore, he by his teaching destroys the design of life, he prevents the possession of Good Thought from being prized. These words of my spirit I wail unto you, O Mazda, and to the Right.
Evil | Faith | Good | Land | Mind | Order | Principles | Prosperity | Blessed |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain..; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
The man you seek is here. I stand before you, Trojan Aeneas, torn from Libyan waves. O you who were alone in taking pity on the unutterable trials of Troy, who welcome us as allies to your city and home- a remnant left by Greeks, harassed by all disasters known on land and sea.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
It is with sorrows, as with countries, each man has his own.
Beside this door were a dung-hill, mattocks and shovels, some carts, an old well with its flagstone and iron pulley, a frisky colt, a strutting turkey, a chapel topped by a little steeple, an espaliered pear tree in bloom, against the wall of the chapel; such was the court whose conquest was Napoleon's dream. This bit of earth, if he could have taken it, would perhaps have given him the world.
Order |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The less life in a person, the more he will try to live off your life.
In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.
The great outlines and the great sublimity of nature — the cradle of the ocean, the profile of the mountains, the shade of the forests, the blue of the heavens — are composed of elements of intense discord mingled harmoniously together.