This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When the Soviet government is experiencing a difficult period and plots are being hatched by bourgeois elements and when at a critical moment we manage to lay bare these plots — do they think they are discovered accidentally? Oh, no, not accidentally. They are discovered because the plotters live among the masses, because they cannot succeed in their plots without the workers and peasants and it is there that, in the long run, they run up against people who go to that badly organized, as they said here, Cheka and say that exploiters are gathered in a certain place.
Experience | Struggle | Theoretical |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Bitterness | Experience | Quiet |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.
Experience | Faith | Grave | Little | Will | Think | Understand |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.
Experience | Will | Happiness |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
Experience | Nothing | Thought | Wrong | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Writing the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.
Experience | Words |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is a serious question among them whether they [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.
Experience | Wise | Learn |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Jealousy is the art of doing yourself more harm than others.
Experience | Love | Soul |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? It will be a hard pull for me; the tide rises high, almost to the lips and perhaps higher still, how can I know? But I shall fight my battle, and sell my life dearly, and try to win and get the best of it.
Experience | Nature |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The dry high spirits of this destroyer of optimism make most optimists look damp and depressed.
Tragedy |
One of the by-products of the state of dhyan is that fearlessness is awakened. Fearlessness is very different from bravery. Bravery is an attribute of the mind, which can be and has been cultivated by the state, religion and family for their own purpose, but it is an attribute that can also be lost. Once fearlessness is awakened it can never be extinguished, fear no longer enters the mind. Fearlessness is awakened when man has faith either in his own understanding or has faith in the Universal Intelligence.
Control | Experience | Loneliness | Mind |
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
The mechanized concepts of image, relevancy, feasibility, and efficiency are now being seen as gimmicks by which white America fools itself into believing it has created a culture. In reality, it has used these plastic devices to avoid the necessity of having a real culture.
Experience | Time |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily... Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been too happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.
Experience | Mind |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I have often neglected my appearance. I admit it, and I also admit that it is shocking. But look here, lack of money and poverty have something to do with it too, as well as a profound disillusionment, and besides, it is sometimes a good way of ensuring the solitude you need, of concentrating more or less on whatever study you are immersed in.
Better | Enough | Experience | Good | World | Youth | Youth | Learn |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don't they both fall into the ditch?
Experience | Important |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings.
Experience | Past | Will | Wonder |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven.
Ecstasy | Experience | People |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
Acquaintance | Defects | Experience | Genius | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Novels | Play | Thought | Time | Woman | Words | Thought |