This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
Absolute | Equality | Freedom | Genius | Life | Life | Man | Men | Opportunity | Order | Right | World |
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
To worship God and to leave every other man free to worship Him in his own way; to love one's neighbor, enlightening them if one can and pitying those who remain in error; to dimiss as immaterial all questions that would have given us no trouble if no importance had been attached to them- this is my religion, it is worth all your systems and symbols.
Enemy |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Duty bound, Aeneas, though he struggled with desire to calm and comfort her in all her pain, to speak to her and turn her mind from grief, and though he sighed his heart out, shaken still with love if her, yet took the course heaven gave him and turned back to the fleet.
Things are not so important; the transcendental truth of things is of value.
Laziness |
Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
Each plays the part that is his heritage; from choir to choir they pass, from sphere to sphere, and deck themselves with joy or sorry cheer, as Fate the comic playwright fills the page.
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Macbeth, Act v, Scene i
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings? So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labor, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first — and all this for trifles that no man really needs!
The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired.
Power |
Of neither, girl; For if of joy, being altogether wanting, It doth remember me the more of sorrow; Or if of grief, being altogether had, It adds more sorrow to my want of joy; For what I have I need not to repeat, And what I want it boots not to complain.
No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of them in the next. Dante is worshiped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.