This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Viewing the world as a large pieced-together collection of fragments, some of which are labeled as friend and others as foe, begins internally. We map out our internal territories with the same positive or negative designations as we do external territories, and wars go on there as they do in the world. Internally, we are divided against ourselves; the emotions want one thing, the intellect another, the impulses of the body yet another, and a conflict takes place which is no different in quality, although it is in scale, from that of the world wars. If we are not related to ourselves in wholeness, is it any surprise that we cannot perceive the wholeness of the world? If we believe ourselves each to be a patched-together, unmatched assortment of desirable and undesirable features, motives at odds with each other, undigested beliefs and prejudices, fears, and insecurities, will we not project all this on the world?
Care | Individual | Meditation | Problems | Responsibility | Will | Happiness |
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
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing - nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway, not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Anger | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Necessity | Pain | Size | Writing |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Thus all things are doomed to change for the worse and retrograde.
He looked like a caryatid on vacation; he was supporting nothing but his daydreams.
Herbs (medicines),while descending down from heaven to earth proclaimed those who eat us, are never destroyed.
We have all around us, in the atmosphere, the music emanating from all the Broadcasting Stations of the World, but they do not assail your ear at any time. You are not aware of any Station; but, if you have a receiver and if you tune it to the correct wavelength, you can hear the matter broadcast from any Station; if you fail to tune it correctly, you will get instead of news only nuisance.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say.
Family | Grief | Life | Life | Little | Pain | Story | Tears | Time |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The unknown, said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Pain |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The tricks of illusion came to him so easily that it seemed he had been born knowing them and needed only to be reminded.
Pain |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
Children | Despair | Evil | Happy | Pain | People | Praise | Treason | Trouble | Happiness |
An emmet may work its heart out, but can never make honey.
Appreciation | Pain | People | Appreciation |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.
Business | Choice | Death | Destroy | Pain | War | Will | World | Business |