This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.
Adolescence | Aesthetic | Authority | Duty | Learning | Little | Looks | Man | Nature | Need | Peace | Pleasure | Reading | Taste | War | Work | Learn |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
There is probably no act, for instance, which does good to anyone without doing harm to someone else, and vice versa.
Consideration | Duty | Gratitude | Justice | Need | People | Promise | Recompense | Self-improvement |
W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
There is little difference in people but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Heart Center is a transpersonal dimension or level. The Initiation forces are conducted in the dimension of Sacred Space, not in time and space, so we enter another dimension to access those forces. Through the daily attunement to the Heart Center there is a long-term transformation of the ego which then begins not only to orient to the Transcendent, to be responsive to the Transcendent, but there is also a birth into the dedicated ego, which is a transcendent kind of development which is neither the vast Deity itself, nor is it the ego-self – it is someplace in between, and has access to all the richness of compassion and healing.
Adventure | Awareness | Defense | Demeanor | Experience | Extreme | Giving | Important | Indifference | Knowledge | Law | Means | Power | Qualities | Sacred | Time | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Awareness |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
The main task of any teacher is to make a subject interesting.
Duty | Energy | Teacher | Understand |
W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
Energy then is morally neutral, it is good or bad depending on the direction it takes. Our task is to provide legitimate outlets for it. The provision of such outlets is important in three ways - for society, for the individual and for the learning of subjects. For any society that wishes to remain civilized this is the highest priority; only by providing satisfactory activities for all citizens can delinquency, vandalism, crime and violence become exceptional rather than normal. This is a priority of which our dominant institutions seem totally unaware. For the individual, finding a satisfactory outlet for energy means a sense of fulfillment and escape from frustration. For the learning of subjects it is the driving force without which little will be learned.
Children | Duty | Energy | Enthusiasm | Life | Life | Society | Society | Child |
The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.
Politic man ordained imagination as the fateful sin. Grandmother and her basketful of pears must be the crux for our compendia.
Conscience | Law | Moral law |
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
You took me weak and unprepared. I had not thought that you who shared my days, my nights, my heart, my life, would slash me with a naked knife and gently tell me not to bleed but to accept your crazy creed.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
[How do you rank yourself among writers?] I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
Duty |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution.
Duty |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.
Duty | Means | Revolution |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organizational development of socialist society.
Bourgeoisie | Bribery | Bribery | Duty | Means | People | Practice | Regard | Will |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of eachother's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.
Childhood | Duty | Heart | Life | Life | Lust | Melancholy | Mortal | Nothing | Sense | Old |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.