This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen's religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated.
Age | Civilization | Little | Means | Power | Proletariat | Revolution | Will |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.
Age | Circumstances | Virginity |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearts. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
It is now clear to me that the family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family.
Adolescence | Age | Beginning | Life | Life | Old age | Power | Youth | Youth | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Age | Cleanliness | Extravagance | Genius |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It’s on the field, it’s on the pane, it’s in the sky — beauty; and I can’t get at it; I can’t have it — I, she seemed to add, with that little clutch of the hand which was so characteristic, who adore it so passionately, would give the whole world to possess it!
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts if family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the led; if there was a draft she sat in it-- in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others... I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
Age | Experience | Men |
For a woman as for a man, marriage might enormously help or devastatingly hinder the growth of her power to contribute something impersonally valuable to the community in which she lived, but it was not that power, and could not be regarded as an end in itself. Nor, even, were children ends in themselves; it was useless to go on producing human beings merely in order that they, in their sequence, might produce others, and never turn from this business of continuous procreation to the accomplishment of some definite and lasting piece of work.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.