This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year?... I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.
Reality |
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 |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
We can accept God becoming man to save man, but not man becoming god to save himself.
The human heart cannot contain only a limited amount of despair and then in expanded sea that passes over the sponge without adding to its water and single tear after wet and filled
There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering--a hell of boredom.
Reality |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task. . . . He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
Envy | Future | Love | People | Reality | Reason | Will | Work |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
All are wicked to some extent or other. Therefore, everyone needs correction; and everyone has to be educated and guided into the right path.
Man is flying to the Moon and diving into the Sea; but he does not know how to live on Earth with his fellow men in Love and Peace. He moves towards the Moon for fear others may reach there before him and dives through the Sea to strike terror, himself terrified of others.
Appearance | Nature | Reality |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.
Doubt | Integration | Man | Nature | Reality | Relationship | Science | World |
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
Order | Prediction | Reality | Sound |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
Birth | Civilization | Faith | Global | History | Human race | Race | Reality | Science |
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.
Day | Earth | Eternal | God | Heaven | History | Insight | Life | Life | Little | Love | Mind | Obedience | Openness | Prayer | Present | Psychology | Reality | Sacred | Submission | Vision | Will | Words | Work | God |
Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.
Consequences | Contemplation | Conversation | Decision | Deliberation | Dread | Enough | Glory | Illusion | Life | Life | Men | Past | Poverty | Practice | Reality | Deliberation | Contemplation | Think |
Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
Love between the ugly, is the most beautiful love of all.