This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
She says, but in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
For things are produced in accordance with the will of nature; not to suit man's pleasure, but as it were by a chance distribution.
Nature |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
Generosity | Love | Pain |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
This, to use an American term in which discovery, retribution, torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive nutshell, was it.
Children | Darkness | Fate | Husband | Joy | Pain | Reason | Tenderness | Thought | Fate | Loss | Thought |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Jealousy is the art of doing yourself more harm than others.
Experience | Love | Soul |
The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.
Action | Duality | Energy | Intelligence | Love | Pain | Pleasure | Sorrow | Wholeness | Will | Afraid |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?
Atheism | Crime | Fanaticism | Passion |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Use, do not abuse; the wise man arrange things so. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
Abstinence | Excess | Man | Wise |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
Abstinence | Excess | Man | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Beginning | Example | Failure | Heart | Light | Little | Nothing | Pain | Sense | Taste | Time | Waste | Will | Wonder | Failure |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Anger | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Pain | Size | Writing |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Excitement | Imagination | Thought | Time | Witness | Thought |