This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.
Bible | Body | Fear | Grief | Harmony | Sense | Soul | Spirit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Work | World | Bible | Thought |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: Whom do you write for? The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.
Virtue | Virtue | Friendship | Friends | Vice |
W. D. Ross, fully Sir William David Ross
We apprehend that conscientiousness or benevolence is good with as complete certainty, directness, and self-evidence as we ever apprehend anything.
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self - in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
Accomplishment | Honesty | Integrity | Virtue | Virtue |
William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, fully Field Marshal Sir William Joseph "Bill" Slim
Personal leadership exists only as the officers demonstrate it by superior courage, wider knowledge, quicker initiative, and a greater readiness to accept responsibility than those they lead.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Under these circumstances, there has arisen in society a figure which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.
Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
On this principle of arrangement, the voice, uttered from the stage as from a center, and spreading and striking against the cavities of the different vessels, as it comes in contact with them, will be increased in clearness of sound, and will wake an harmonious note in unison with itself.
Excellence | Good | Indignation | Need | Excellence |
The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.
Ability | Energy | Indignation | Opportunity | Struggle |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Atheist: A name given by theologians to whoever differs from them in their ideas concerning the divinity, or who refuses to believe in it in the form of which, in the emptiness of their infallible pates, they have resolved to present it to him. As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not believe in the God of the Priest.
Vice |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel, that when we find one who is only weak, we are happy.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
Ignorance | Spirit | Superstition | Thought | Virginity | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other — and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.
Art | Books | Literature | Little | Space | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Work | Writing | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I like it when people actually come, but I love it when they go.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Ever a various, changeful thing is woman