This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
Consciousness | Discovery | Evolution | Knowing | Self | Discovery |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
Lack of knowledge – that is the problem.
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks the young emerald, evening star, good light for drunkards, poets, widows, and ladies soon to be married.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.
Action | Death | Delay | Government | Government |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split.
Consciousness | Man | Order |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Marx said that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat lies between capitalism and communism. The more the proletariat presses the bourgeoisie, the more furiously they will resist. We know what vengeance was wreaked on the workers in France in 1848. And when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
If the writer of these lines has succeeded in providing some material for clarifying these problems, he may regard his labors as not having been fruitless.
Consciousness | Nature | World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust
Awakening | Consciousness | Memory | Perception |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Betrayal | Consciousness | Familiarity | Force | Fraternity | Life | Life | Order | People | Torture | Parting |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles.
Consciousness | Poetry | Position | Regard | Universe |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you we'll, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
Action |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death we're a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then not in dreams but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and it's castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
Consciousness | Habit | Love | Space | Thinking |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?
Consciousness | Knowing |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Men appear to prefer to ruin one another's fortunes, and to cut each other's throats over a few miserable villages, than to extend the means of human happiness
Awareness | Consciousness | Eternal | Knowing | Awareness |
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 |
We have accepted the watertight compartments of society, the fragmentation of living as factual and necessary. We live in relationship to these fragments and accept the internalized divisions—the various roles we play, the contradictory value systems, the opposing motives and priorities—as reality. We are at odds with ourselves internally; we believe that the inner is fundamentally different from the outer, that what is me is quite separate from the not-me, that divisions among people and nations are necessary, and yet we wonder why there are tensions, conflicts, wars in the world. The conflicts begin with minds that believe in fragmentation and are ignorant of wholeness.
Acceptance | Action | Awareness | Culture | Desire | Meaning | Passion | Peace | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Right | Service | Society | Will | Society | Awareness |
We will discover that there are systems and structures that inevitably lead to aggression, exploitation, and war. We have accepted aggression as a way of living. We create and entrench ourselves in structures which culminate in wars. Retaining the structures and avoiding wars is not possible. You and I as individuals have to realize how we are responsible, how we cooperate with the systems and thereby participate in the violence and wars. And then we must begin to inquire whether we can discontinue cooperating with the systems, whether we can stop participating in wars, and explore alternative ways of living for ourselves.
Action | Happy | Individual | Responsibility | Society | Tomorrow | Society | Value |