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
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other — and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Absence | Personality | Simplicity | Temper |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.
Art | Books | Literature | Little | Space | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Work | Writing | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I like it when people actually come, but I love it when they go.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Ever a various, changeful thing is woman
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Washington acted as the representative of the needs, the ideas, the enlightened men, the opinions of his age; he supported, not thwarted, the stirrings of intellect; he desired only what he had to desire, the very thing to which he had been called: from which derives the coherence and longevity of his work. That man who struck few blows because he kept things in proportion has merged his existence with that of his country: his glory is the heritage of civilization; his fame has risen like one of those public sanctuaries where a fecund and inexhaustible spring flows.
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.
Can you not see that to decide to do nothing is the most wretched of all decisions?
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.
Renouncement of evils and sins helps in the attainment of prosperity and success.
Consciousness | Focus | Pride |
That earth which formerly was water upon the ocean (of space), which the wise (seers) found out by their skillful devices; whose heart is in the highest heaven, immortal, surrounded by truth, shall bestow upon us brilliancy and strength, (and place us) in supreme sovereignty.
If we are good to people then we are reciprocated in the same manner but if we are bad to them then we will most obviously be paid in the same coin.