This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
Who can think of the sun costuming clouds when all people are shaken or of night endazzled, proud, when people awaken and cry and cry for help?
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
Consequently, since this study is vast in extent, embellished and enriched as it is with many different kinds of learning, I think that men have no right to profess themselves architects hastily, without having climbed from boyhood the steps of these studies and thus, nursed by the knowledge of many arts and sciences, having reached the heights of the holy ground of architecture.
Belief | Body | Education | Human nature | Nature | Observation | Receive | Will | Instruction |
The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, except that the reader leaned above the page, wanted to lean, wanted much to be the scholar to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: the access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, in which there is no other meaning, itself is calm, itself is summer and night, itself is the reader leaning late and reading there.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
If from the earth we came, it was an earth that bore us as a part of all the things it breeds and that was lewder than it is. Our nature is her nature. Hence it comes, since by our nature we grow old, earth grows the same. We parallel the mother's death.
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain - There it was, word for word, the poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed a place to go to in his own direction. How he had recomposed the pines, shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds for the outlook that would be right, where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: the exact rock where his inexactness would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, recognize his unique and solitary home.
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
White has been abstracted into a magical nebulous mythology that dominates all inhabitants of our country in their attitudes toward one another. We are all prisoners of that mythology so far as we rebel against it.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Anger | Belief | Desire | Knowing | Love | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Peace | Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Belief | Body | Courage | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Opportunity | Past | Reality | Talking | Will | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Belief | Body | Children | Courage | Determination | Effort | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Opportunity | Past | Poverty | Power | Reality | Talking | Will | World | Worth |
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.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.
Belief | Love | Man | Meaning | Poetry | Salvation | Thought | Thought |