This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.
A spontaneous cessation of mental activity releases an absolutely new and dynamic energy. Silence increases the sensitivity of the total being. It refreshes the nervous system in an astounding way. As you come out totally replenished when you have had profound and innocent sleep, So do you come out totally renewed when you have had ceased to function through the ego in the hour of silence.
Beginning | Challenge | Consciousness | Effort | Global | Isolation | Luxury | Mind | Question | Self-righteousness | Understanding | Wholeness | Will | Crisis |
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.
Character | Commitment |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions - women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unresolved problems.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
But the root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
Parents teach in the toughest school in the word: The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor, all rolled into two.... There are few schools to train you for your job, and there is no general agreement on the curriculum.... You are on duty, or at least on call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least 18 years for each child you have. Besides that, you have to contend with an administration that has two leaders or bosses, whichever the case may be.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
Critic | Feelings | Important | Life | Life | Worship | Value |
Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape… You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk.
Character | Personality |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Let me rage before I die.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them.
François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself.
Ceremony | Character | Death | Impression | Nations | Reason | Respect | Sacred | Respect |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of human is through love and in love.
Chance | Dignity | Fate | Man | Meaning | Self-preservation | Suffering | Fate |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.
Death | Enjoyment | Existence | Fate | Fulfillment | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Fate |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.
Chance | Example | Liberty | Man | Men | People | Strength | Suffering | Think |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.