This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does this mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system and the social and economic reforms, which have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class.
Capitalism | People | Proletariat | Vengeance | Will | Wonder |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy.
Excitement | Grace | History | Little | Means | Men | Power | Right | Self | Television | Wonder | Understand |
We become aware of all that is happening within us, of the different emotions arising within us, for example if we begin to get angry we are aware of it and so the grip of anger loosens its hold over us.
Beauty | Darkness | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nothing | Peace | People | Rest | Suffering | Universe | Wonder | World | Beauty |
The world today forces us to accept, at least intellectually, our oneness, our interrelatedness. And more and more people are awakening to the urgency of arresting the accelerating madness around us. As yet, however, our ways of responding are superficial, unequal to the complexities of the challenge. We do not take or even consider actions that threaten our security or alter our habitual ways of drifting through life. If we continue to live carelessly, indifferently, emphasizing private gain and personal indulgence, we are essentially opting for the suicide of humanity.
Beauty | Intelligence | Life | Life | Nothing | Rest | Universe | Wonder | Beauty |
I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.
News | Television | War | Wisdom | Wonder |
We have moved very far away from love in our collective lives, dangerously near destruction, close to starvation. Perhaps we have the wisdom now, the awareness that love is as essential to human beings as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Love is the beauty, the delicate mystery, the soul of life, the radiant unspoiled purity that brings spontaneous joy, songs of ecstasy, poems, paintings, dances, dramas to celebrate its indescribable, never-to-be-fully-captured bliss of being. Can we bring love into the marketplaces, into the homes, the schools, the places of business, and transform them completely? You may call it a utopian challenge, but it is the only one that will make a significant difference or that is fully worthy of the potential of whole human beings.
Motives | Nations | People | Relationship | Wonder | Value |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And I is high tide. Swell. He arches his back. I feel a fresh miss that cableaz? that proud steed that rider hits him with spurs and Harness it then. You, that I wear on his back, tell me what enemy is the one who came to see us, while our rings clatter on the pavement? 's Death. Death is the enemy. I can run against her spear lying down, with long hair flying behind me like tresses of a young man as you gallop Percival's tresses in India. Stick spurs into the horse's ribs. Unbridled and ruthless, I can run against you, Death! waves crashing to shore.
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 being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings.
Experience | Past | Will | Wonder |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Living in the now is freedom from all problems connected with time. You ought to remember that sentence, you ought to memorize it, and ought to take it out, you ought to practice it, you ought to apply it. And most of all, you ought to rejoice in it because you have just heard how not to be wretched, miserable you anymore but to be a brand new, and forever brand new man or woman.
Befriend him, death, and pity him, may he from here arise. Unharmed, with sound limbs, hearing perfectly, through old age carrying a hundred years, let him get enjoyment by himself (unaided).
Wonder |
What little man has to accomplish must be done quickly, at the place that is assigned to him and within the time that is allotted to him. And, man has such a formidable task before him; it is to fulfill it that he has come as man, exchanging for this human habitat all the merit he has acquired during many past lives. The task is no less than the manifestation of the Divinity latent in man.
Awe | Capacity | Control | Humility | Man | Sense | Will | Wonder |
The relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.
Culture | Happy | People | Revolution | Society | Strength | Trust | Wonder | World | Society |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
That is very dangerous... in an absolutely legal way and in accordance with the wording of the law, but against the spirit of the ... constitution.
Whenever logical processes of thought are employed— that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove— there is an opportunity for the machine. Formal logic used to be a keen instrument in the hands of the teacher in his trying of students' souls. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.
Absolute | Chance | Energy | Guidance | Meaning | Phenomena | Property | Science | Space | Time | Universe | Wonder | Guidance |