This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wassily Kandinsky understood ‘form’ as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be ‘simple as a child’. He intended, with his ‘inner-self’ to rid himself of ‘philosophical barricades’ (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.
Age | Desire | Future | Happy | Ideas | Life | Life | Think |
Tell me not of joy: there's none now my little sparrow's gone; He, just as you, would toy and woo, He would chirp and flatter me, He would hang the wing awhile, till at length he saw me smile, Lord! how sullen he would be!
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Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, and though a late, a sure reward succeeds.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
It is a truly sublime spectacle when in the stillness of the night, in an unclouded sky, the stars, like the world's choir, rise and set, and as it were divide existence into two portions,--the one, belonging to the earthly, is silent in the perfect stillness of night; whilst the other alone comes forth in sublimity, pomp, and majesty. Viewed in this light, the starry heavens truly exercise a moral influence over us; and who can readily stray into the paths of immorality if he has been accustomed to live amidst such thoughts and feelings, and frequently to dwell upon them? How are we entranced by the simple splendors of this wonderful drama of nature!
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
Blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that that blindness cannot see.
Age | Contradiction | Life | Life | Model | Reflection | Time |
In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word talent, which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there, it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as a child with measles must be kept under the blankets.
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Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
It [space travel] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.
Age | Bible | Destroy | Enough | God | Good | History | Knowledge | Law | Moral law | Nature | Power | Question | Revelation | Science | Space | God | Bible | Learn |
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that set the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion. Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know--the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More importantly, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe--that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and has been replaced by man's monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.
Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
To captivate our varied and worldwide audience of all ages, the nature and treatment of the fairy tale, the legend, the myth have to be elementary, simple. Good and evil, the antagonists of all great drama in some guise, must be believably personalized. The moral ideals common to all humanity must be upheld. The victories must not be too easy. Strife to test valor is still and will always be the basic ingredient of the animated tale, as of all screen entertainments.
Age | Challenge | Happy | Hope | Inspiration | Joy | Promise | Will | Youth | Youth |
The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom. Not until man is willing to recognize his animal nature — in the good sense of the word — will he create genuine culture.
Age | Body | Character | Civilization | Machines | Order | Philosophy | Power | Problems | Thinking | Time | Think | Understand |