This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ah, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes may weep, but never see, a night of memories and sighs I consecrate to thee.
Fame | Heaven | Land | Little | Love | Nothing | Peace | World | Worth |
Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
I am reminded how hollow the label of leadership sometimes is and how heroic followership can be.
Style | Universe | Vision | Leader | Leadership |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
Behavior is a much better barometer of what you are than words.
Work |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
The only antidote to anger is to eliminate the internal sentence, ‘If only you were more like me.’
Will |
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Evil is unspectacular and always human and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
May I suggest that the deepest experience in vulnerability is to completely accept its Suchness as the ego/Ego coming into fuller relationship with the Divine. Thought forms of past, present, and future are simply too ego indulgent in the later stages of life. Variations on this theme are Masochism/Sadism and Pleasers/InyourFaceers. They are legitimate paths unless arrested by the ego too frightened to see what actually lurks under the drive to power.
Attention | Dynamic | Ego | Life | Life | Mystery | Nothing | Opportunity | People | Wholeness | Will | Loss | Think |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The unconscious is composed of multiple, autonomous personalities. These personalities affect our state of health -- from allergic response to disease states such as diabetes and cancer. He suggests that the unconscious mind is far more extensive and powerful than is generally acknowledged, and that the normal conscious mind cannot hope to control the personalities within. Esoteric rites and initiations, he maintains, were designed to call forth particular personalities from the unconscious at appropriate stages of development.
Dreams | Ego | Influence | Life | Life | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Position | Reflection | Think |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to serious literature (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: great books). I am not sincere, I am not provocative, I am not satirical. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of thaw in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As in the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
Dreams | Man | Mathematics | Tomorrow |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct.