This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Noises at dawn will bring freedom for some, but not this peace. No bird can contradict.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Illness comes from living too small a process or too large a process.
Art | Awareness | Compensation | Experience | Individual | Present | System | Universe | Will | Wrong | Art | Awareness | Value |
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak the peculiar potency of the general, to compound the imagination's Latin with the lingua franca et jocundissima.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I need to become beautiful, become remarkable, become unforgettable, become someone’s everything.
Impression | Lying | Method | Need | Respect | Time | Respect |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.
But being a religious person, I would like to question the validity of everything for myself. That is the essence of religion, which is humility. Not to accept anything unless you understand the meaning there of, personally in your life. If you accept without understanding, you will be imposing upon the mind. And then you are neither true to the mind, nor true to the meaning. The essence of religion, which is humility, lies in uncovering the meaning of life, uncovering the meaning of every moment, learning the meaning for ourselves.
Behavior | Change | Compassion | Design | Focus | Individual | Injustice | Injustice | Motives | Need | Opportunity | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Society | System | Will | Society |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing.
Good | Life | Life | Light | Love | People | Pity | Reason | Sentiment | Society | Sympathy | Society |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.
Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered...
Deeds done with a sense of righteousness do not give an opportunity for sin to breed and consequently inhibit the emergence of sin and evil.
Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
The Self is within all, and it is without all. – Isha Upanishad
Body | Consciousness | Day | Heaven | Light | Mortal | Self | World |
Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.