This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unfrocked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.
Will |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Nothing will spoil a big man’s life like too much truth.
People |
Whitney Young, fully Whitney Moore Young, Jr.
You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.
Dignity |
Popular religion in our midst, however, has greatly reduced the notion of obedience, so that it has become either a virtue too much celebrated or a burden too much dreaded.
The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud. Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him in New Haven with an eye that does not look beyond the object.
Woman |
Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
There's this idea that somehow you've got to keep changing things, and as often as possible. Maybe if people just decided not to buy anything for a while, they'd get a chance to think about what they wanted; what they really liked.
Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes.
Beauty | People | Personality | Style | Will | Beauty | Think |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Under no circumstances would he [Humbert Humbert] have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
Beauty | Imagination | Means | Men | Soul | Thought | World | Beauty | Old | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Kay Arr, said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say Kay Arr close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. A marvelous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life!
Contemplation | Control | Decision | Father | Inclination | Light | Mother | Position | Qualities | Quiet | Sadness | Spirit | Parting | Contemplation | Old |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
One must love everything.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
War |
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
Men |
Be convinced of one Truth about Me; Swami will never lay his hand on a task without proper reason and without some profound effect that will flow there from.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
When it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weather-worker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where sorcerers come thick, like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the use of having power if you were too wise to use it.