This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Principles | Self | Understand |
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.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Some people — and I am one of them — hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.
Excitement | Grace | History | Little | Means | Men | Power | Right | Self | Television | Wonder | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbors ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go - but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turned and disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back of the bedroom. She was still there moving about at the other end of the room. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery, which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn't believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room, there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
There is a way out of the human problem and anyone can find it.
Self |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Your first duty is toward yourself, your inner freedom, the truth.
Self |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
When troubled, we have our choice of either surface comfort or psychic understanding. If the choice is for comfort, such as associating with those who sympathize, we cannot have understanding. The demand for comfort blocks psychic insight. But if the choice is for understanding, which forces you to stand all alone without comfort, understanding breaks through. Every time we choose understanding over comfort, we walk a greater distance away from troubles, for such are caused by misunderstanding.
Self |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
To make it to heaven on earth, you have to be able to recognize a bad state the moment Satan sends it to you.
Self |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The knowledge of human behavior will lead you to God.
Self |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor--or maybe because of it--we were carried away by nature's beauty, which we had missed for so long.