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
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Poetry |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
You fear the books as some towns feared the violins. Keep reading, and let dance; these two amusements will never do harm to the world.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The pursuit of what is true and the practice of what is good are the two most important objects of philosophy.
Pleasure |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The richest endowments of the mind are temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Prudence is a universal virtue, which enters into the composition of all the rest; and where she is not, fortitude loses its name and nature.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The tolerance of all religions is a law of nature, stamped on the hearts of all men.
Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.
Commitment | Excellence | Government | Life | Life | Politics | Excellence | Government |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Need | Reconciliation |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr. M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr. M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
Poetry |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Intelligence | Man | Mind | Woman |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
Comedy | Experience | Life | Life | Means | Poetry | Tragedy | Poem |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent... there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
Art | Intelligence | Life | Life | Art |