This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Man … always acts either self-loving, just for the hell of it, or God-loving, just for the heaven of it; his reasons, his appetites are secondary motivations. Man chooses either life or death, but he chooses; everything he does, from going to the toilet to mathematical speculation, is an act of religious worship, either of God or of himself.
Abstract | Body | Children | Dawn | Day | Fidelity | Hope | Insult | Love | Soul | Thinking | Time | Will | World | Insult |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Seeking world peace is not about peace, it is power and control all under the guise of service to humanity.
Ability | Appreciation | Enough | Experience | Means | Mind | Music | Nature | People | Quiet | Silence | Struggle | Talking | Writing | Appreciation |
W. B. Stevens, fully William Baker Stevens or William Bacon Stevens
It cannot be too strongly emphasized, in this day of secularism on the one hand and the love of a sensuous ceremonial on the other, that the true strength of the church does not lie in its historic continuity with the apostles' days; does not lie in its great creeds; does not lie in its hallowed liturgy; does not lie in its learned ministry; does not lie in its churches and cathedrals--it may have all these, and yet, like the apostolic church of Sardis, have a name to live, and yet be dead. Its apostolic ministry may be apostolic in lineage and not in spirit; its grand creeds may be but great petrifactions of orthodox faith; its venerable liturgy may be but the embroidered cerements of a corpse; its beautiful churches and basilicas may be but mausoleums of a lifeless worship. What the church must have, and by which only it can live, is the constant, realized, positive indwelling of the Holy Ghost. All our worship, all our teaching, must be subordinated to this divine Spirit.
W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith
The belief, the try, a camera and some film - the fragile weapons of my good intentions. With these I fought war.
Compassion | Enough | Important | Rest | Right | Sense | Understanding |
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, as he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn, daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her home no longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn where she was wont to roam.
To say of one mask it is like, to say of another it is like, to know that the balance does not quite rest, that the mask is strange, however like.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's control not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the warm skin of which he felt a teleplastic mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver. (The Vane Sisters)
Little |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?
Absence | Children | Distinguish | Listening | Melody | Nothing |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.
Association | Beauty | Joy | Men | Nature | Solitude | Youth | Association | Youth | Beauty |