This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
All her lovers have passed, her beautiful lovers have passed, the young and eager men that fought for her arrogant hand, and the only voice which endures to mourn for her at the last
Reality |
The major men that is different. They are characters beyond reality, composed thereof. They are the fictive man created out of men. They are men but artificial men.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Dialectics is the teaching which shows how Opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical,—under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another,—why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it. 2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume)—all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention. 3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
Proletariat | Reality |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?
Disguise | Dreams | Evil | Life | Life | Promise | Reality | Thought | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Really, what a strange man he is, thought Klara, with that aching feeling of loneliness which always overcomes us when someone dear to us surrenders to a daydream in which we have no place.
Enough | Lord | Mystery | Reality | Understand |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.
Existence | Faith | Impossibility | Persistence | Reality | World |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
We think not in words but in shadows of words.
Reality |
Because the source of human conflict, social injustice, and exploitation is in the human psyche, we must begin there to transform society. We investigate the mind, the human psyche, not as an end in itself, as a self-centered activity, but as an act of compassion for the whole human race. We must move deep to the source of decay in society so that the new structures and social systems we design will have a sufficiently healthy root system that they will have an opportunity to flourish. The structures of society need to be transformed, but the hidden motivations and assumptions on which the structures rest need to be transformed as well. The individual and collective values and motives that give sanction to the injustice and exploitation of modern society must become the focus of change as much as the socioeconomic and political structures. We no longer will be able to allow the motivations and values that underlie personal and collective behavior to remain hidden and unexamined. It serves no lasting purpose for us to change the surface structures and behaviors while the deep foundations remain decadent and unsound.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
Reality | Reflection |
Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It has the force of intelligence, creativity, and the strength of love. Compassion cannot be cultivated; it derives neither from intellectual conviction nor from emotional reaction. It is simply there when the wholeness of life becomes a fact that is truly lived.
Absolute | Compassion | Life | Life | Nothing | Oneness | Principles | Reality | Will |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
However, the painter of the future will be a colorist, such as has never yet existed. Manet was working towards it, but as you know the Impressionists have already got a stronger color than Manet. This painter of the future- I can't imagine him doing
Reality |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life... looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!' But this does not exclude making what is possible...
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge, are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? — not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
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
No, never say now, no one in this world, that they were this or that. She felt very young, and at the same time unspeakably old. As a razor passed through all; while kept out looking. He had a perpetual sense, as she watched the cars, being outside, alone and far out at sea; always felt it was very, very dangerous to live, for one day it was. Do not judge that smart, or too out of the ordinary. Nor could learn how life had gone through with the few fingers that had given him knowledge Fräulein Daniels. I knew nothing, nor language, nor history; rarely read a book now, except memoirs in bed, but as the absorbed everything, cars passing, and would not say to Peter, would not say of herself: I am this, I am what .