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 change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which rest the love-and lung-condemned.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.
Change | Difficulty | Position | Revolution | Time | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Most of the great men of this world live as if they were atheists. Every man who has lived with his eyes open, knows that the knowledge of a God, his presence, and his justice, has not the slightest influence over the wars, the treaties, the objects of ambition, interest, or pleasure, in the pursuit of which they are wholly occupied.
But being a religious person, I would like to question the validity of everything for myself. That is the essence of religion, which is humility. Not to accept anything unless you understand the meaning there of, personally in your life. If you accept without understanding, you will be imposing upon the mind. And then you are neither true to the mind, nor true to the meaning. The essence of religion, which is humility, lies in uncovering the meaning of life, uncovering the meaning of every moment, learning the meaning for ourselves.
Behavior | Change | Compassion | Design | Focus | Individual | Injustice | Injustice | Motives | Need | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Society | System | Will | Society |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
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.
Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a people.
Appearance | Change | Life | Life |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay's knee.
Angels | Battle | Change | Death | Health | Heaven | Jealousy | Little | Love | Soul | Thinking | Think |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the draft turns into the sketch and the sketch into the painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.
It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground.
Change | Family | Study | World | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
Parents teach in the toughest school in the word: The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor, all rolled into two.... There are few schools to train you for your job, and there is no general agreement on the curriculum.... You are on duty, or at least on call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least 18 years for each child you have. Besides that, you have to contend with an administration that has two leaders or bosses, whichever the case may be.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
Business | Change | Death | Life | Life | Nature | Possessions | Time | Business |
Like no one else,' I told him in a letter written at the end of July, 'you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places....The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon or wind on the moorlands or rich music...or books that have meant more to me than I can explain, or the smell of the earth after a shower or the calmness of the sky at sunset...This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world, whatever it may be like when we're beyond the sun. The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realize you as tangible.
Change |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and dither falling in love, meeting together. It's true they are much less bound by ceremony, convention, than we are. Royal words meet with common words. English words marry French words, German words. Indian words, Negro words.
Change | Good | Hate | Merit | Will | Words | Worth | Think |