This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
Good | Happy | Mathematics | Reputation | Waste | Old |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
What caused the war? The greed of the Italian money bags and capitalists, who need new markets and new achievements for Italian imperialism. What kind of war was it? A perfected, civilised blood bath, the massacre of Arabs with the help of the “latest” weapons.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.
Imitation | Individual | Inspiration | Land | Language | Light | Man | Means | Necessity | Reason | Submission | Time | Unique | Waste |
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.
Silence and Emptiness - In the dimension of silence the movement of thought goes on without creating the illusion of a thinker. The reception of the sensation and the interpretation of the objects surrounding you takes place without the interpreter. The movement of thought goes on without the thinker. There is no centre to say: "I like this and I dislike that, I prefer this and I have a hatred for that". So there is involuntary cerebral activity without the psychological recording or registering. The movement of thought, the movement of knowledge goes on in the body like the movement of breath, of blood. Silence implies the existence of the total human past within you, inside you. It also implies the movement of knowledge, thought, etc. without the knower, without the thinker. The absence of the knower, the thinker, the experiencer, the centre - is the essential part of what we call silence. And because there is no centre, no knower, no experiencer you call it emptiness.
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
I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy--to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.
Loneliness | Lying | Truth | Waste | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I want to donate, I want you gifts, and solitude in which I reveal my possessions.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Comfort | Lord | Nature | Philosophy | Waste | Will | Old | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.
It has been said that science is opposed to, and in conflict with revelation. But the history of the former shows that the greater its progress, and the more accurate its investigations and results, the more plainly it is seen not only not to clash with the latter, but in all things to confirm it. The very sciences from which objections have been brought against religion have, by their own progress, removed those objections, and in the end furnished full confirmation of the inspired Word of God.