This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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
A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady.
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 |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing
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 |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
For me, the work is an absolute necessity. I cannot put it off; I don't care for anything else; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once, and I become melancholy when I cannot go on with my work. I feel then as the weaver does when he sees that his threads have got tangled, the pattern he had on the loom has gone to the deuce, and his exertion and deliberation are lost.
Impulse |
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.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.
Sense |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Advice | Desire | Discontent | Good | Happy | Sense | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Beginning | Example | Failure | Heart | Light | Little | Nothing | Pain | Sense | Taste | Time | Waste | Will | Wonder | Failure |
I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen, heard, understood and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand and touch another person. When this is done, I feel contact has been made.
I have often thought had there been somebody like me around, something might have been able to be done. I also think I don't see how I could have done what I've done in the world had I been married. And when I decided — because I've been on the verge of marriage many times — I said no, because if I wanted to roam the globe like I did, it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to me, it wouldn't be fair to the people. At the point, I really feel it was a kind of destiny because I've been able to get to places. There are some people in the world who have other jobs to do.
Ability | Adolescence | Beginning | Purpose | Purpose | Sense | Will |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
Day | Death | Existence | Mind | Nothing | People | Play | Quiet | Sense | World |
Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
People | Sense | Will | Understand |