This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Mathematics... possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
Art | Beauty | Mathematics | Music | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Art | Beauty |
Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored.
Culture | Experience | Freedom | Fulfillment | Nothing | Order | Search | Self | Self-realization | Style | World |
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.
Excellence | Life | Life | Quiet | Strength | Success | Will | Words |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Poetry |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
Day | Existence | Future | God | History | Life | Life | People | Responsibility | Style | Will | God |
Life is a romantic business. It is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I meant he true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?
Beauty | Character | Folly | Good | Grace | Harmony | Mind | Simplicity | Style |
The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.
Conformity | Life | Life | Style |
I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
I`m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it`s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It`s not just an art form; it`s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It`s my way of telling a story.
Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.
Writing |
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
When ambition enters, creativity disappears -- because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future -- and a creative person is always in the present.
Ambition | Creativity | Future | Love | Man | Writing | Ambition |
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.
Style |
Beware you are not a fiery, persecuting enthusiast. Do not imagine that God has called you (just contrary to the spirit of Him you style your Master) to destroy men’s lives, and not to save them. Never dream of forcing men into the ways of God. Think yourself, and let think. Use no constraint in matters of religion. Even those who are farthest out of the way never compel to come in by any other means than reason, truth, and love.
Constraint | Destroy | God | Means | Men | Spirit | Style | God | Think |