This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Hell: A cooking stove which heats the sacerdotal sauce-pan here below. It was founded on behalf of our priests, to the end that the latter may never be wanting in good cheer.
Wise |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Use, do not abuse; the wise man arrange things so. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
Abstinence | Excess | Man | Wise |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Superstition, born of paganism and adopted by Judaism, invested the Christian Church from earliest times. All the fathers of the Church, without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were really in communication with the devil.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
Abstinence | Excess | Man | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear, she thought; once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream? And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.
Beauty | Conversation | Little | Space | Spirit | Wise | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
Conversation | Spirit | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels.
Convention | Liberty | Wise |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you---how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions.
Beauty | Conversation | Little | Space | Spirit | Wise | Beauty |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Why is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard the Second. It is poetry that I want now -- long poems. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; having no time to waste any more on prose. When I was twenty I liked Eighteenth Century prose; now it's poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in the front of a public house.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Human problems cannot be solved by human nature.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Always stay on the path of seeing what is wrong, then you will see what is right.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The world says, ‘How little can I give — how much can I gain.’
Wise |
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Destiny | Philosophy | Wise |
The word Gothic, in the sense in which it is generally employed, is wholly unsuitable, but wholly consecrated. Hence we accept it and we adopt it, like all the rest of the world, to characterize the architecture of the second half of the Middle Ages, where the ogive is the principle which succeeds the architecture of the first period, of which the semi-circle is the father.
It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.
Books | Consolation | People | Troubles | Wise |