This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die
Art | Capacity | Good | Guests | Husband | Impression | Men | People | Quiet | Smile | Space | Woman | Art |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Bitterness | Experience | Quiet |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
All right Mister, let me tell you what winning means... you're willing to go longer, work harder, give more than anyone else.
Better | Dedication | Quiet | World |
Meditation - If I am aware of the nature of my reactions, and movement of my reactions, naturally that awareness will result in freedom from the reaction. I cannot stop the reaction, because the reactions have been rooted in the sub-conscious, in the unconscious. I cannot prevent, I cannot renounce, I cannot check them. But if I am aware, simultaneously of the objective challenge, the subjective reactions and the causes of those reactions, then it results in freedom. Then the momentum of reaction will not carry me over with it, but I will be ahead of the reactions; I will not be a victim of my reaction, but I will see them as I see the objective challenge. That for me is meditation. All-inclusive attention while moving in life. Meditation does not involve any mental activity at all.
Body | Chance | Depression | Health | Indulgence | Order | Orderliness | Quiet | Religion | Will |
Today, with the scars of our past failures marring our existence and the fears of the future weighing heavily on our spirits, we can no longer go on with this dangerous game of fragmentation. We can no longer escape the fact that we are all bonded, equal in wholeness. Science and technology have brought each of us into intimate relationship with all others. We are truly a global human family. Yet as a family, we have not learned how to live together in peace, to live without violence and exploitation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell wrote: “Man knows how to fly in the air like a bird, he knows how to swim in water like the fish, but how to live among other human beings, he does not know.”
Acceptance | Consequences | Entertainment | Good | Habit | Inevitable | Injustice | Injustice | Little | Terror | Will |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
Day | Death | Existence | Mind | Nothing | People | Play | Quiet | Sense | World |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion, then I go out and paint the stars.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!
Contemplation | Control | Decision | Father | Inclination | Light | Mother | Position | Qualities | Quiet | Sadness | Spirit | Parting | Contemplation | Old |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Instead of blaming the outer world examine the inner world.
Quiet |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it.
Acceptance | Agony | Contentment | Man | Noise | People | Quiet | Words | Wrong | Value |
There is no judge so searching as conscience conducting its own trial.
Action | Consequences |
All other tastes are bland and insipid; through them, the body and mind are rendered insipid as well.
Consequences | Ignorance | Men | World |
Stealing the wealth of others, coveting another man’s wife and doubting the integrity and character of friends - these three lead to one’s destruction.
Consequences | Kill | People | Wealth | Will |
Temperance is to the body what religion is to the soul, the foundation and source of health and strength and peace.
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
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.
Consequences | Desire | Dread | Liberty | Mind |