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
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 |
Knowledge helps dormant intelligence to awake and become conscious which automatically brings so many additional advantages.
That charm which causes the gods not to disagree, and not to hate one another, that do we prepare in your house, as a means of agreement for your folk.
I dedicate this soul; I am a sacrifice, a sacrifice to them. Bowing low, I fall at the Feet of the Lord.
Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, the variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The word he used was not wallowing, there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally coating continually and thickly with excrement. The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.
Wise |
Anger is the enemy which takes one’s life. Anger is enemy with the face of a friend. Anger is like a very sharp sword. Anger destroys everything.
Action | Good | Man | Misfortune | Safe | Tragedy | Wise | Misfortune |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.