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.
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Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?
An army is a strange composite masterpiece, which strength results from an enormous sum total of utter weaknesses. Thus only can we explain a war waged by humanity against humanity in spite of humanity.
Civilization | People | Poetry |
Love almost replaces thought. Love is a burning forgetfulness of everything else.
Hunger | Literature | Poetry | Wants |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair.
Belief | Love | Man | Meaning | Poetry | Salvation | Thought | Thought |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
Ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man... What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Achievement | Angels | Belief | Contemplation | Life | Life | Love | Man | Meaning | Nothing | Poetry | Position | Right | Salvation | Thought | Time | Truth | Wisdom | World | Contemplation | Thought | Understand |
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations. But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formations.
Belief | Love | Meaning | Poetry | Salvation | Thought | Thought |
Quite naturally, common people take inspirations from them and try to emulate them.
In the Divine Path, there is no chance of failure; it is the Path of Love.
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
There’s no excuse for poverty in a state as rich as California. We can produce so much food that we have to dump it into our bay.
Distinguish | Dreams | Men | Music | Poetry | Sacred | Words | Friends |