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
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
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
And I could not believe that with my going I should bring so great a grief as this. But stay your steps. Do not retreat from me. Whom do you flee? This is the last time fate will let us speak.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The common fund of experience is very deep.
Rest |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Women do not write books about men - a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper.
A thing that smoked and clacked along on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine of little value, a kind of toy, the daydream of a visionary, a utopia -- a steamboat. The Parisians regarded the useless thing with indifference.
Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious
He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.
There are only two or three things really worth having in life, and friendship is one of them.
Poverty |
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
We'll see men dress priestly eat human flesh, it is another whole scene scene
Right |
Every person should listen only to good and should abhor anything that is evil or bad.
Gloom |
Time, the steed, runs with seven reins (rays), thousand-eyed, ageless, rich in seed. The seers, thinking holy thoughts, mount him, all the beings (worlds) are his wheels.
Those who obtain the wealth of the Lord's Name move freely in the world; all their affairs are resolved.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
There's a point, around age twenty, ... when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Good |
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity, it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.
Appearance | Giving | Piety | Public | Old |
The needs of business, and the extensive market obviously waiting, assured the advent of mass-produced arithmetical machines just as soon as production methods were sufficiently advanced.
Order |
The religion of the gospel has power, immense power, over mankind; direct and indirect, positive and negative, restraining and aggressive. Civilization, law, order, morality, the family, all that elevates woman, or blesses society, or gives peace to the nations, all these are the fruits of Christianity, the full power of which, even for this world, could never be appreciated till it should be taken away.