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
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
Affectation | Business | Famous | Genius | Good | Need | Posterity | Sincerity | Skill | Will | Business |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
We play different roles, but we're the same.
Need |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Admiration is a terrible thing. It is division. The idea stands between you and the good life.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
I will explain to you why you’re not happy, why you’re not carefree. It’s because you’re trying to collect things. You’re a collector, and you think that every time you get one of those objects that you desire so fervently it adds something to you, to your security. Well, I would guess that if you take paper and pencil and write down all the things you’ve acquired — friends, romances, exciting occasions, physical objects — it would number in the thousands, wouldn’t it, tens of thousands of things you have possessed for a few seconds or maybe several years. Maybe you’ve had that house for 50 years, for example. How come you’re still worried?
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
All your problems, yes all of them, have a parent problem.
Need |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Cosmic confidence grows with the simple realization that truth exists — which few people really realize.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
A person obsessed with the need to be happy will never be so. The obsession is the obstruction. He does not really seek happiness, rather he seeks for a condition which matches his personal idea regarding the nature of happiness. But happiness is not a mere idea, for one idea will always have competition from another idea. This is why the unhappy man chases forever from one attraction to another. Happiness will come when he stops chasing, that is, when he stops thinking that an idea about happiness is the same as happiness. A man enjoying the sunshine does so without analyzing it.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
If you call one thing good, you must call its opposite bad. If you think it wonderful to make a big profit in your business, you will also think it terrible if you incur a large loss. The idea is to live above the opposites.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Realize that ordinary thoughts cannot contact God. This explains why past attempts to reach higher help have failed. Usual thought is filled with egotism, which blocks contact.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
Staying home (spiritually) is where a true spiritual hero is. Don’t go into thought.
Need | Understanding |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
The next time you feel pushed around by life, ask who is the pusher and who is the pushed?
Need |
How is it, then, that we have collectively bamboozled ourselves into believing in material limitlessness? That we could grow our businesses without reference to their field of play – the resources of the earth? That our possessions could grow without reference to the limits of our ability to pay, now or in the future? The same ideology that treated land like an input for industrial agriculture, depleting it of available nutrients and filth had turned me away from caring for my own exquisite territory of body and soul. I came to call the kind of freedom we practice as Americans “hyper-freedom.” Freedom on steroids. We took “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as permission for all of us to seek our own good in a system we thought should get in our face the very least possible.
Choice | Cost | Longing | Mind | Need | Rest | Time | World |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
There is no one in the entire world who condemns you. You yourself are the only person who condemns you - and pointlessly. In reality, there is no condemnation whatever, but, as long as you think there is, you ache. Not only that, but a man dwelling with the illusion of self-condemnation is compulsively driven to do things that increase the illusion. There is no man, nor god, nor past experience to condemn you. You are free and you are free right now. Will you try to see this?
Need |
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
You need only choose . . . then keep choosing as many times as necessary. That is all you need do. And it is certainly something you can do. Then as you continue to choose, everything is yours.