This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
Comedy | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Poetry | Tragedy | Poem |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Art | Experience | Man | Marriage | Mind | Sense | Woman | Art |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Living from the outer to the inner; that means that you have roving eyes and alert ears to look out at the panorama of society and wonder and hope and contrive to try to get something from the outer that will satisfy the inner.
Experience | Past | Present |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
You are not really bothered by what others think of you. You are bothered by what you think of yourself.
Cause | Experience | Learning | Power |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
There is only one tyrant in life, which is a lack of understanding of life.
Experience | Illusion | Man | Past | Right | Will | World | Think |
He was not willing for there to be any man on earth without a country.
Earth | Experience | Joy |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The need to impress others causes half the world's woes. Don't add to them. Be real, not impressive.
Experience | Life | Life |
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Experience | Life | Life |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of wealth or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.
Experience | Fear | Need | Nothing |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Existence | Experience | Man | Power |
This (man) shall live and shall not die, we rouse this man (to life). I make for him a remedy, O death, do not slay the man.
Experience | Self-reliance | Learn |
Ignorant and naïve people should try to acquire maximum knowledge from the knowledgeable ones.
Experience | Knowledge |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.
Experience | Humanity | Man | Men | Question |
What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how, and to whom to say things.
Experience | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nothing | Prosperity | Will | Learn |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also to be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled by a few.
Ability | Difficulty | Experience | Important | Means | Present |
I have preserved my identity, put its credibility to the test and defended my dignity. What good this will bring the world I don't know. But for me it is good.
Choice | Experience | People |