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
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
Hope | Husband | Immortality | Love | Pity | Thinking | Will | Writing | Blessed |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I feel such creative power in myself that I know for sure that the time will arrive when, so to speak, I shall regularly make something good every day. But very rarely a day passes that I do not make something, though it is not yet the real thing I want to make.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.
Weakness |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have that splendid scene too clearly in my mind to be satisfied with what I have made of it. But I find in my work an echo of what struck me...
Force | Hope | Influence | Present | Public | Work | Think |
Act On Your Understanding - Never argue with one's own understanding. The whisper of intelligence is always there, whatever you do. If you create a time lag between the whisper of intelligence and understanding in you and your action, then you are preventing the cerebral organ from growing into a new dimension. When you argue with intelligence, when you postpone acting according to understanding then there is confusion, the brain gets confused. The voice of understanding, the voice of intelligence has an insecurity about it. How do you know that it is the right thing? So we tend to ignore it. Instead we accept authority. We conform. But the brain cannot be orderly, competent, accurate and precise if you do not listen to it, if you have no respect. We are so busy with the outside world, and its compulsions, that the world that is inside us does not command that respect and reverence, that care and concern from us. So one has to be a disciple of one's own understanding, look upon that understanding as the master. Sometimes one may commit a mistake, it might be the whim of the ego and we might mistake the whim, the wish of the ego for the voice of silence and intelligence, but that we have to discover. Unless you commit mistakes, how do you learn to discriminate between the false and the true? In learning there is bound to be a little insecurity, a possibility of committing mistakes. Why should one be terribly afraid of committing mistakes? So instead of accepting the authority of habits and conditionings, while one is moving one watches, and when there is a suggestion, a whisper from within, from one's own intelligence, one does not neglect, ignore, or insult that. To eliminate the time lag between understanding and action is the way to grow into spontaneity.
Correct diet implies the right quality and quantity as well as the frequency of intake. Eating should be related to appetite. It should not cause any excitement, or emotional disturbance. It should be gone through peacefully and happily. One has to be very alert to see that everything one eats is fully digested. The body should not be burdened with undigested food. The cleanliness of all the internal organs is one of the most important factors of meditation.
Compassion | Decision | Force | Life | Life | Strength | Wholeness |
Whether you try to influence the mind through ideas and concepts, or through discipline and vows, or through drugs, you are trying to stimulate artificially a state of silence. Perhaps if we are friendly with the mind, if we watch the mind, if we understand the mind, if we let it wander, let it roam about wherever it wants, let it exhaust its momentum by wandering, without scolding, without praising, without
Awareness | Defense | Force | Global | Heart | Responsibility | Theories | Truth | Understanding | Will | Witness | World | Awareness |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
And there rose in her an unmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her. If she could have felled her it would have eased her. But it was not the body; it was the soul and its mockery that she wished to subdue; make feel her mastery.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace.
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.
Force | Genius | Integration |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.
Abstract | Abuse | Beauty | Body | Control | Day | Emotions | Enough | Firmness | Heart | Learning | Nothing | Object | Play | Space | Tears | Thinking | Time | Woman | Words | Beauty | Old | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers ... Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft in the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.
Beauty | Children | Force | Life | Life | Light | People | Spirit | Thinking | Thought | Woman | World | Worship | Beauty | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She was singing a senseless singsong, so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favorable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace she wore.
Husband |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind