This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Progress comes from trial and error, when we're free to try things and free to reject ideas that don't work. That makes me optimistic about the future. The problem comes when people either try to stamp out experimentation or try to cram one possibly hare-brained scheme down everyone's throat.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Value |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more... to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it... Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Love came up to me showing me that a contented mind is best for growth.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Realize that truth disturbs in order to cure.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The truly practical person is the one who is trying to understand and end his inner warfare.
In summer, he metamorphoses into a frog; and in the evening, at nightfall, by the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena, from the coal rafts and washerwomen's boats, he plunges headfirst into the Seine, and into total infraction of the laws of modesty and the police.
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.
A man is known by his deeds. So, our deeds should be such that helps in earning respect in the society.
O Lord! May our ears listen to nothing but auspicious words, may our eyes see nothing but auspicious things; may we have healthy bodies and be blessed with long life.
Enemy | Self-control |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, How beautiful the world could be.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: ‘And what about man? Are you sure that the the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?