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
The Oxford Don: `I don't feel quite happy about pleasure.'
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.
Mistake |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
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. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.
Contempt | Ideals | Looks | Revelation | Self | Sense | Soul | Strength | World |
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.
Control | People | Responsibility | Self-improvement | System |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
Ends | Glory | Men | Right | Righteousness | Search | Training | Truth | Work | Think |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
[How do you rank yourself among writers?] I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
Duty |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their own country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.
Darkness | Day | Death | Ends | Life | Life | Panic | Progress | Suicide | Thought | Time | Afraid | Old | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
It would have been better to stay in the Paradise of Eldorado instead of returning to this accursed Europe. How right you are, my dear Martin! Everything is illusion and calamity!
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.
Contempt | Cultivation | Literature | Reward |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Friend |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Association | Beauty | Joy | Solitude | Association | Beauty |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
Only he can be an artist who has a religion all his own - an original way of viewing infinity.