This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; when the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; when I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.
Children | Day | Earth | Light | Men | Miracles | Nothing | Quiet | Space | Old |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
Dirty |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Good |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.
Past |
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.
It is better to reenter hell and become an angel, than to remain in heaven and become a demon.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.
Noise |
I serve the slaves of His slaves; in so many ways, I beg of Him. Setting them upon the scale, I have weighed all comforts and pleasures; without the Lord's Blessed Vision, they are all totally inadequate.
If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.
Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.
Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. ! Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Hamlet at V, i)
Love |