This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
Appearance | Feelings | Heart | Passion |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
Passion |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such- be it so; but I love, and how could I feel love if I did not live, and if others did not live, and then, if we live, t
Better | Confidence | Desire | Enough | Hope | Life | Life | Money | Need | Passion | Time | Will | Work | Trouble | Learn | Think |
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
All the white man had succeeded in creating in his time on this continent had been a violent conglomerate of individuals, not a people. Being a people is more a state of mind than it is a definable quality.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Anger | Belief | Desire | Knowing | Love | Mind | Nothing | Passion | Peace | Truth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Church | Desire | Knowledge | Love | Man | Nothing | Passion | Truth | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
Desire | Man | Nothing | Passion | Rage | Sense | Happiness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotized, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, forever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.
Passion |
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 |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
He utters empty words, he utters sound without mind.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Endure the present, and watch for better things.
Passion |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The next time you feel pushed around by life, ask who is the pusher and who is the pushed?
Need |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Self-knowledge is everything. If you know what you are all about, you know what life is all about. You are not separate from life; you are life itself.
Crime |
Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.
Heart | Passion | Circumstance |
The habit of reading... produces dignity of manners... custom... is more despotic than law.
Guilty |
The little people must be sacred to the big ones, and it is from the rights of the weak that the duty of the strong is comprised.