This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity.
Beginning | Family | Global | Good | Knowledge | Patience | People | Politics | Principles |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
But in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie, mortal, guilty, but to me the entirely beautiful.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Put the car away; when life fails what's the good of going to Wales? Here am I, here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?
Poetry |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
Poetry | Responsibility |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
Action | Deeds | Men | Mistake | Poetry | Time | World | Deeds |
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The stately ship is seen no more, the fragile skiff attains the shore; and while the great and wise decay, and all their trophies pass away, some sudden thought, some careless rhyme, still floats above the wrecks of Time.
Age | Belief | Culture | Existence | Faith | Ideas | Imagination | Legends | Life | Life | Light | Little | Poetry | Religion | System | Time |
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Age | Art | Beauty | Consciousness | Culture | Elegance | Evidence | Excitement | Failure | Family | Good | Hate | Health | Life | Life | Loneliness | Marriage | Past | People | Politics | Recreation | Reward | Science | Self | Talking | Time | Work | World | Failure | Loss | Art | Beauty |
If sex were all, then every trembling hand could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.
Life | Life | Opposition | Politics |
Just as my fingers on the keys make music, so the selfsame soul on my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound.
Poetry |
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Poetry |
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, o sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, there is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, like the clashed edges of two words that kill.
Vita Sackville-West, fully The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson
Within the people I love, I always seem to detect something obstinate, almost up to the cruelty. A kind of core, a flame absolute rigor, a bit like they were determined to be faithful no matter what their commitments.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views.
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Let the “socialist” snivelers croak, let the bourgeoisie rage and fume, but only people who shut their eyes so as not to see, and stuff their ears so as not to hear, can fail to notice that all over the world the birth pangs of the old, capitalist society, which is pregnant with socialism, have begun.
Failure | Politics | Will | Failure | Understand |
Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the free workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are entitled only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.
Politics |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles.
Consciousness | Poetry | Position | Regard | Universe |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.
Battle | Books | Growth | Life | Life | Loafing | Man | Mind | Obsession | Pleasure | Rest | Science | Search | Struggle | World | Old |