This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | People | Unhappiness |
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Envy | Existence | Individual | Jealousy | Life | Life | Light | Unhappiness |
Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men.
There is a certain artificial polish, a commonplace vivacity, acquired by perpetually mingling in the beau monde, which, in the commerce of the world, supplies the place of a natural suavity and good humor, but is purchased at the expense of all original and sterling traits of character. By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to irradiate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good will.
Sorrow |
Young lawyers attend the courts not because they have business there but because they have no business anywhere else.
Beauty | Cause | Darkness | Desire | Existence | Health | Heart | Life | Life | Little | Love | Melancholy | Nature | Rest | Sorrow | Strength | Will | Woman | World | Friendship | Beauty |
The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes.
Affliction | Agony | Consolation | Duty | Error | Friend | Grief | Love | Meditation | Mother | Present | Sadness | Sorrow | Child |
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course, is to be effected by stratagem.
Sorrow |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
John, she said, does it make every one unhappy when they study and learn lots of things. He paused and smiled. I am afraid it does, he said. And, John, are you glad you studied? Yes, came the answer, slowly but positively. She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, I wish I was unhappy,—and—and, putting both arms about his neck, I think I am, a little, John.
Beauty | Heart | Life | Life | Longing | Mistake | Music | Sorrow | Talking | Time | Vision | World | Beauty |
Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a portal; but in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
I hate women because they always know where things are.
The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures.
Action | Duality | Energy | Intelligence | Love | Pain | Pleasure | Sorrow | Wholeness | Will | Afraid |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
Beauty | Enough | Life | Life | Nature | People | Sorrow | Beauty |