This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum?
I praise the Frenchman, his remark was shrewd - how sweet, how passing sweet is solitude but grant me still a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper solitude is sweet.
Pity |
Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is.
Behavior | Blame | Fault | Influence | Means | People | Pity | War | World | Fault | Victim |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
Pity |
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.
Day | Gold | Luxury | Memory | Necessity | Pity | Public | Reason | Will | Child | Old |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
Hope | Husband | Immortality | Love | Pity | Thinking | Will | Writing | Blessed |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Ideas are like beards; men do not have them until they grow up.
Pity |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and too prudent.
Pity |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing.
Good | Life | Life | Light | Love | People | Pity | Reason | Sentiment | Society | Sympathy | Society |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
Ecstasy | Father | Love | Means | Nothing | Pity | Woman | Old |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Not surpassing in crafty measures, but in the power of arms.
One of the hardest tasks is to extract continually from one's soul an almost inexhaustible ill will.
Pity |
So long as man is a child, God wills him to be innocent.
Appearance | Contempt | Conversation | Ends | Past | Pity | Old |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The prosperity of the wicked kings are fatal to people.
Pity |