This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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 |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Emerged from the tentative ways, the obscurities and dazzle of youth, we look straight in front of us, ready for what may come (the door opens, the door keeps on opening). All is real; all is firm without shadow or illusion. Beauty rides our brows.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person.
Habit |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
Belief | Body | Courage | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Opportunity | Past | Reality | Talking | Will | World |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Since our appearances, that part of us which appears, are so fleeting compared to the other, the unseen part of us, stretching away, means that the unseen can survive, be recovered somehow attached to a person or another , or even haunting certain places after death.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among laboring, uneducated servile people. I was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. I was is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery , who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet, genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Belief | Body | Children | Courage | Determination | Effort | Freedom | Habit | Life | Life | Little | Men | Need | Opportunity | Past | Poverty | Power | Reality | Talking | Will | World | Worth |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
Nothing is more invincible than dreams, and man is virtually made up of dreams.
Habit |
The harsh blows of fate have this especial quality, that however self-perfected we may be, however disciplined, they draw from us the true essence of ourselves.
V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.
Apothegms are the wisdom of the past condensed for the instruction and guidance of the present.
Habit |
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
But self-renunciation means God-possession, the being possessed by God. Out of utter humility and self-forgetfulness comes the thunder of the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord." High station and low are leveled before Him. Be not fooled by the world's power. Imposing institutions of war and imperialism and greed are wholly vulnerable for they, and we, are forever in the hands of a conquering God. These are not cheap and hasty words. The high and noble adventures of faith can in our truest moments be seen as no adventures at all, but certainties. And if we live in complete humility in God we can smile in patient assurance as we work. Will you be wise enough and humble enough to be little fools of God? For who can finally stay His power? Who can resist His persuading love? Truly says Saint Augustine, "There is something in humility which raiseth the heart upward."
Business | Competition | Desire | Discernment | God | Growth | Habit | Humility | Important | Life | Life | Little | Looks | Meekness | Money | Nothing | Obedience | Poverty | Pride | Self | Soul | Superiority | Trifles | Will | Business | God |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labor lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? Hamlet, Act iii, Scene 1
O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
Age | Chance | Disease | Good | Habit | Hate | Life | Life | Little | Luxury | People | Thinking | Time | Will | Learn | Think |
From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.