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
There's just this… an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.
Art | Better | Books | Criticism | Enough | Future | History | Hope | Means | Money | Past | Philosophy | Poetry | Research | Thought | Will | Art | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard... But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?
Sages discovered this link of the existent to the nonexistent, having searched in the heart with wisdom.
He performs worship ceremonies, applies the ceremonial tilak mark to his forehead, and takes his ritual cleansing baths; he pulls out his knife, and demands donations.
Praise |
In his hearth and home, in his palace, upon his soft and comfortable bed, day and night, the flower-girls scatter flower petals; but without the Lord's Name, the body is miserable. Horses, elephants, lances, marching bands, armies, standard bearers, royal attendants and ostentatious displays - without the Lord of the Universe, these undertakings are all useless.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Applause | Envy | Eternal | Ideals | Men | Praise | Self | Society | Society |
The same gold is fashioned into various articles; just so, the Lord has made the many patterns of the creation.
The Siblings of Destiny meet together, and eat and spend, but these resources do not diminish; they continue to increase.
To the animals of the earth and those of heaven, to the wild beasts of the forest, to the winged birds, do we speak, they shall deliver us from calamity.
Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
Where one sees another, one hears another, so long as there are two, there must be fear, and fear is the mother of all misery. Where none sees another, where it is all one, there is none to be miserable, none to be unhappy. – Chandogya Upanishad
We are suffering today from a species of Christianity as dry as dust, as cold as ice, as pale as a corpse, and as dead as King Tut. We are suffering not from a lack of correct heads but of consumed hearts.
Conformity | Criticism | Spirit | World |
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.
Children | Despair | Evil | Happy | Pain | People | Praise | Treason | Trouble | Happiness |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Men have big claims and small projects.
Fear | Inclination | Weakness |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
It is a pity that men cannot usually possess no talent without any desire to put others down.
Mediocrity | Praise |
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
We must all wait and worry all the time and men.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
Young people know love rather than beauty.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
The tempests of youth are mingled with days of brilliant sunshine.