This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Now since I have seen the ocean with my own eyes, I feel completely how important it is for me to stay in the south and to experience the color which must be carried to the uttermost- it is not far to Africa.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.
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
I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
Body | Indifference | Opinion |
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
It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until - you know the little tug - the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?
God | Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Vision | World | God |
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
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
Opinion |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...
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
It is genius that brings into being, and it is taste that preserves. Without taste genius is nought but sublime folly.
Admiration | Censure | Literature | Opinion |
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.