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 design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.
Ability | Authority | Design | Judgment | Knowledge | Men | Object | Position | Practice | Principles | Skill | Study | Theories | Work | Child |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
One cannot live in society and be free from society.
Discovery | History | Knowledge | Life | Life | Science | Technology | Discovery |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Compensation | Death | Knowledge |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. We do not pray to him at all, said the reverend sage. We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.
Affectation | Good | Heart | Knowledge | Sense | Thought | Will | Thought |
Silence in Action - Sensitivity and Pain - To live requires energy and fearlessness, but we are brought up in a pleasure-hunting human race, and pain is something to be afraid of, to be driven away completely, to protect oneself from. But it is the pain and pleasure - the duality - together that make the whole, the wholeness of life. The more sensitive you are and the more you live from the depth of your being, the more vulnerable you are to life. The more sensitive you are and the more capable of loving human beings, the more you will be hurt; there is more sorrow, there is more pain. Psychological hurts, pain and sorrow accompany the sensitivity, intelligence and love. Love and sorrow go together. So, if there is physical or psychological pain, you live with it - not out of despair, not out of self-pity, not out of any weakness. You live with it because it is part of life, it is an expression of life.
Absence | Body | Existence | Illusion | Knowledge | Past | Silence | Thought | Thought |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Good | Imagination | Knowledge | Taste |
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
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, on the man's chest tumulutoso, a passion stronger than impose their belief on others, nothing can take the root of your anger and fill such as knowing that one despises what he worships. [...] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that pits one neighborhood to another neighborhood and makes a parish premedite ruin another parish. Everyone prefers peace of mind and the other holding the triumph of truth and the apotheosis of virtue.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
Acquaintance | Defects | Experience | Genius | Good | Knowledge | Life | Life | Novels | Play | Thought | Time | Woman | Words | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is ripling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.
Experiment | Knowledge | Meaning | Friends |