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
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
All that a pacifist can undertake -- but it is a very great deal -- is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun, He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God, He who leads the good to wickedness, He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate, He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent, An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Ability in a man is knowledge which emanates from divine light.
Expectation | Peace | Expectation | Happiness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Try to see what attitudes rule your day, then ask what kind of a day you usually have.
Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum
What I like about Hollywood is that one can get along by knowing two words of English -- SWELL and LOUSY.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The whole problem is to get an unaware person to see that he is unaware, which is not easy. How can he see what he will not see? But there are ways, and one of them is to listen to the lesson of suffering. But even this lesson is resisted, for people love their pains in preference to reality. This is because they have not as yet tasted freedom. An animal accustomed to the confining comforts of his cage will fear the open spaces, and will snap at whoever tries to force him out.
It is a consoling idea ... to think that the death penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfauçon, the barrier des Sergents, the Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of life and death--without reckoning the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Grève--than a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its blow.
The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius.
The sword is but a hideous flash in the darkness; right is an eternal ray.
There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de Grève, such as it existed then; it consists in the charming little turret, which occupies the angle north of the Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would soon have disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses which so rapidly devours all the ancient façades of Paris.
Suicides like those that will be carried out here are sublime; but suicide is restricted, and can have no extension; and as soon as it touches those next to you, the name of suicide is murder.