This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs.
Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)
Beauty | Evil | Existence | God | Good | Man | Order | People | Search | Time | Wrong | Beauty | God | Child |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I recall the scent of some kind of toilet powder - I believe she stole it from her mother’s Spanish maid - a sweetish, lowly, musky perfume. It mingled with her own biscuity odor, and my senses were suddenly filled to the brim; a sudden commotion in a nearby bush prevented them from overflowing - and as we drew away from each other, and with aching veins attended to what was probably a prowling cat, there came from the house her mother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note - and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since - until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
Experience | Nothing | Thought | Wrong | Thought |
Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness in a landscape selected at random is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.
Wrong | Friendship | Friends |
Well I think in all the thirty years I've been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it's really, it's not about what I've achieved and if I've become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today.
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
If you hear a voice within you say "You cannot paint," then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
Wrong |
Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may. But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Submit to me. So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.
Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
All troubled people, which is all people, must if they are going to be delivered from themselves, must make the concession that there is a force, an entity, a power that is higher than their own present nature.
Wrong |
Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
Veiling truth in mystery.