This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
Eternal | Good | Need | Punishment | Religion | Society | Society |
The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.
Individual | Life | Life | Solitude |
There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.
When a wise man chooses a sane basis for his arguments, it is no great task to speak well.
For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday
Love... makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.
Many a congregation when it assembles in church must look to the angels like a muddy, puddly shore at low tide; littered with every kind of rubbish and odds and ends --a distressing sort of spectacle. And then the tide of worship comes in, and it's all gone: the dead sea-urchins and jelly-fish, the paper and the empty cans and the nameless bits of rubbish. The cleansing sea flows over the whole lot. So we are released from a narrow, selfish outlook on the universe by a common act of worship. Our little human affairs are reduced to their proper proportion when seen over against the spaceless Majesty and Beauty of God.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Downstairs Peter Beste-Chetwynde mixed himself another brandy and soda and turned a page in Havelock Ellis, which, next to The Wind in the Willows, was his favourite book.
Church | Faith | Father | Hunger | People | Religion | Right | Words | Worth | Think |
In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.
Forgiveness | Nothing | Present | Right | Forgiveness |
God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Soon someone would say the fatal words, "Well, I think it's time for me to go to bed."
Those who complain that they make no progress in the life of prayer because they cannot meditate should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion.
Dependence | God | Language | Life | Life | Little | Religion | Universe | God |