This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Because the source of human conflict, social injustice, and exploitation is in the human psyche, we must begin there to transform society. We investigate the mind, the human psyche, not as an end in itself, as a self-centered activity, but as an act of compassion for the whole human race. We must move deep to the source of decay in society so that the new structures and social systems we design will have a sufficiently healthy root system that they will have an opportunity to flourish. The structures of society need to be transformed, but the hidden motivations and assumptions on which the structures rest need to be transformed as well. The individual and collective values and motives that give sanction to the injustice and exploitation of modern society must become the focus of change as much as the socioeconomic and political structures. We no longer will be able to allow the motivations and values that underlie personal and collective behavior to remain hidden and unexamined. It serves no lasting purpose for us to change the surface structures and behaviors while the deep foundations remain decadent and unsound.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
Reality | Reflection |
Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It has the force of intelligence, creativity, and the strength of love. Compassion cannot be cultivated; it derives neither from intellectual conviction nor from emotional reaction. It is simply there when the wholeness of life becomes a fact that is truly lived.
Absolute | Compassion | Life | Life | Nothing | Oneness | Principles | Reality | Will |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
However, the painter of the future will be a colorist, such as has never yet existed. Manet was working towards it, but as you know the Impressionists have already got a stronger color than Manet. This painter of the future- I can't imagine him doing
Reality |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life... looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!' But this does not exclude making what is possible...
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 |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
Beauty | Imagination | Means | Men | Soul | Thought | World | Beauty | Old | Thought |
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
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Belief | Body | Courage | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Opportunity | Past | Reality | Talking | Will | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
No, never say now, no one in this world, that they were this or that. She felt very young, and at the same time unspeakably old. As a razor passed through all; while kept out looking. He had a perpetual sense, as she watched the cars, being outside, alone and far out at sea; always felt it was very, very dangerous to live, for one day it was. Do not judge that smart, or too out of the ordinary. Nor could learn how life had gone through with the few fingers that had given him knowledge Fräulein Daniels. I knew nothing, nor language, nor history; rarely read a book now, except memoirs in bed, but as the absorbed everything, cars passing, and would not say to Peter, would not say of herself: I am this, I am what .
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year?... I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.
Reality |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Battle | Birth | Children | History | Imagination | Life | Life | Longing | Majority | Meaning | Men | Nothing | Talking | Thought | Will | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Belief | Body | Children | Courage | Determination | Effort | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Opportunity | Past | Poverty | Power | Reality | Talking | Will | World | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
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 |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
We can accept God becoming man to save man, but not man becoming god to save himself.
Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats.
Imagination | Memory |
The human heart cannot contain only a limited amount of despair and then in expanded sea that passes over the sponge without adding to its water and single tear after wet and filled