This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"A light here required a shadow there." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state of mind is propitious for creative work, because the mind of an artist, in order to achieve to the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which lay open at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." - 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." - 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." - 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." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world -- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Punctuality is one of the minor virtues which we do not acquire until later in life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past." - Vera Mary Brittain
"I’m an ordinary man who discovered the extraordinary." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Light never battles darkness, so whenever you see a fight it is always between two dark forces." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"There is no natural need to be bad." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The characteristic of men of genius of the first order is to produce each a distinctive model of man." - Victor Hugo
"Every moving thing I have held fast. Eye and breath I have held fast. I have held fast all limbs in the deep gloom of the night." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I subdue enemies with the help of my 'knowledge' and 'enlighten' near and dear ones." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The Lord is the Lover of His devotees; He inspires them to perform devotional worship. True devotional worship consists of eliminating selfishness and conceit from within." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"When God becomes merciful, He leads you to meet the True Guru; all peace is in the Name of the Lord." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Well may he be content to live a hundred years who acts without attachment who works his work with earnestness, but without desire, not yearning for its fruits – he, and he alone. – Isha Upanishad" - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
"You could have golden treasure buried beneath your feet, and walk over it again and again, yet never find it because you don't realize it's there. Just so, all beings live every moment in the city of the Divine, but never find the Divine because it is hidden by the veil of illusion. - Chandogya Upanishad." - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
"A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo there is an element nobody can question: the air attacks, the bombs, are not caused by a material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian: What is at stake here are the principles, human rights which have priority above state sovereignty. This makes it legitimate to attack the Yugoslav Federation, although without the United Nations mandate." - Václav Havel
"Life cannot be destroyed for good, neither... can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard." - Václav Havel
"The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both." - Václav Havel
"It is difficult to esteem a man as highly as he would wish." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"It is untrue to say a man has made his fortune when he is not capable of enjoying it." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Buddha is one who possesses great wisdom. We, on the other hand, possess great stupidity. Therefore, we should study the Buddha. We should study the great wisdom of the Buddha. We should take the mind of the Buddha as our own mind. We should take the vows of the Buddha as our own vows. In every moment we should be studying and practicing the four immeasurable minds of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and even-mindedness. In every moment we should be cultivating the Dharma gateway of "being able to endure that which is difficult to endure and being able to practice that which is difficult to practice."" - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"If you wish others to know about your good deeds, they are not truly good deeds." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." High station and low are leveled before Him. Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward."" - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
"All the extraordinary men I have known were extraordinary in their own estimation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen
"The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it." - Thucydides NULL
"Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries." - Thucydides NULL
"If God had a bumper sticker, it would probably read: SHINE, DON'T WHINE." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn't make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?" - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"Remember, we do not mount the pulpit to say fine things, or eloquent things, we have there to proclaim the good tidings of salvation to fallen men; to point out the way of eternal life; to exhort, to cheer and support the suffering sinner; these are the glorious topics upon which we have to enlarge -- and will these permit the tricks of oratory, or the studied beauties of eloquence? Shall truths and counsels like these be couched in terms which the poor and ignorant cannot comprehend? Let all eloquent preachers beware lest they fill any man's ear with sounding words, when they should be feeding his soul with the bread of everlasting life! -- Let them fear lest instead of honouring God, they honour themselves! If any man ascend the pulpit with the intention of uttering A Fine Thing, he is committing a deadly sin." - William Gouge