This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Generally we waste energy in unessential secondary things. This criminal waste leaves us tired and troubled at the end of the day. An overtired and emotionally disturbed person cannot sleep profoundly. The sacred night is wasted and you begin the next day with a sluggish body and a lethargic mind.
Most of us are not aware of our motivations for living or our priorities for action. We drift with the tides of societal fashions, floating in and out of social concerns at the whim of societal dictates and on the basis of images created by the media or superficial, personal desires to be helpful, useful persons. We are used to living at the surface, afraid of the depths, and therefore our actions and concerns about humanity are shallow, fragile vessels easily damaged. Ultimately most of us are concerned chiefly with our small lives, our collection of sensual pleasures, our personal salvation, and our anxiety about sickness and death, rather than the misery created by collective indifference and callousness.
Perfection | Silence | Understanding | Understand |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
Books | Imagination | Light |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life.
Absence | Body | Existence | Illusion | Knowledge | Past | Silence | Thought | Thought |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Good | Imagination | Knowledge | Taste |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
Beauty | Imagination | Means | Men | Soul | Thought | World | Beauty | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folded her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If you tell the truth about yourself, you can hardly tell the other people.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Since our appearances, that part of us which appears, are so fleeting compared to the other, the unseen part of us, stretching away, means that the unseen can survive, be recovered somehow attached to a person or another , or even haunting certain places after death.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Battle | Birth | Children | History | Imagination | Life | Life | Longing | Majority | Meaning | Men | Nothing | Talking | Thought | Will | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
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 |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Our freedom can be measured by the number of things we can walk away from.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies.
Abuse | Destiny | Ends | Example | Family | Future | Glory | Humility | Nothing | Search | Silence | Thought | Following | Old | Thought |
Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats.
Imagination | Memory |