This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
One has to watch the movements of the mind without trying to control or suppress it. One has to go through the phase of suffocation, embarrassment and void. It is an unavoidable experience of loneliness through which everyone has to go once in his life.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.
For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.
Men are women's playthings; woman is the devil's.
Chance | Childhood | Wickedness |
A man is in no danger so long as he talks his love; but to write it is to impale himself on his own pothooks.
No matter who, what part of the world we live, live, until a sense of a lack of deep down we are moving. It's a basic thing we are afraid of not getting lost it in the back. Bilenimizde what is missing very little indeed.
Change | Childhood | Life | Life | Religion | Sense | Time | Truth | Understanding | Woman | World |
Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don’t let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. Good to remember…
I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals - grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to an unknown god.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Then there was the concert where the boys refused to sing 'God Save the King' because of the pudding they had had for luncheon. One way and another, I have been consistently unfortunate in my efforts at festivity. And yet I look forward to each new fiasco with the utmost relish.
An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly, the sport of winds and tides, without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course. The moral law is the expression of our inmost nature, and when we live in consonance with it we feel that we are living out our true being.
Age | Childhood | Father | Mother | Respect | Reverence | Respect |
The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.
When house and land are gone and spent, then learning is most excellent.
Childhood | People | Personality |
J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.
J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal.