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
But the root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape… You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.
Character | Personality |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Let me rage before I die.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.
Ceremony | Character | Death | Impression | Nations | Reason | Respect | Sacred | Respect |
I cannot make decisions about things it is not proper for him to decide. He is merely putting in a good word for genuine peace, and for achieving it quickly.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The need poisons the evils it cannot heal.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Fools do not understand men of intelligence.
Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming
Pull one hair and the whole body is affected.
To be good, we must do good and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power.
Few men are more to be shunned than those who have time, but know not how to improve it, and so spend it in wasting the time of their neighbors, talking forever though they have nothing to say.
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time.