This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The general impression is that fifteen year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket. Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters. I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. (The Vane Sisters)" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"All our emotions and thoughts are conditioned reflexes, reactions." - Vimala Thakar
"It is not sufficient that a few in society penetrate to the depths of living and offer fascinating accounts about the oneness of all beings. What is necessary in these critical times is that all sensitive and caring people make a personal discovery of the fact of oneness and allow compassion to flow in their lives. When compassion and realization of oneness becomes the dynamic of human relationship, then humankind will evolve." - Vimala Thakar
"One has to watch the movements of the mind without trying to control or suppress it. One has to go through the phase of suffocation, embarrassment and void. It is an unavoidable experience of loneliness through which everyone has to go once in his life." - Vimala Thakar
"Self-education begins by watching how we are using the energy and learning how not to waste it through." - Vimala Thakar
"Viewing the world as a large pieced-together collection of fragments, some of which are labeled as friend and others as foe, begins internally. We map out our internal territories with the same positive or negative designations as we do external territories, and wars go on there as they do in the world. Internally, we are divided against ourselves; the emotions want one thing, the intellect another, the impulses of the body yet another, and a conflict takes place which is no different in quality, although it is in scale, from that of the world wars. If we are not related to ourselves in wholeness, is it any surprise that we cannot perceive the wholeness of the world? If we believe ourselves each to be a patched-together, unmatched assortment of desirable and undesirable features, motives at odds with each other, undigested beliefs and prejudices, fears, and insecurities, will we not project all this on the world?" - Vimala Thakar
"For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Now since I have seen the ocean with my own eyes, I feel completely how important it is for me to stay in the south and to experience the color which must be carried to the uttermost- it is not far to Africa." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"He who upholds Truth with all the might of his power, He who upholds Truth the utmost in his word and deed, He, indeed, is Thy most valued helper, O Mazda Ahura!" - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"From my example learn to be just, and not to despise the gods." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"God himself has made it possible for you to live without the dark place and the pains that rush out and flood out and take you over. Your choice of wanting to see and work is essential to you if you want to get rid of your feeling of emptiness, of futility. You’ve lied to yourself and said, ‘I know what to do to get rid of the pain.’ You’ve never gotten rid of the pain and that’s evidence of self-deceit. You have to stop playing cruel tricks on yourself. So stop. Now." - 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
"If life is difficult it is simply because the person has not corrected his difficult self." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"A secret is a net; let one mesh drop, and the whole falls to pieces." - Victor Hugo
"If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life — an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"You are strong. You are the provider of joy. Go to the sages and their sons. Live at the place of virtuous souls to become well-cultured ." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: Dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting. [Of London]" - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain." - Václav Havel
"Nobility is a legacy, like gold and diamonds." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Man is not born crowned like the natural king of beasts, for beasts by this investiture have need to know the head they must obey." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Doctrine is the necessary foundation of duty; if the theory is not correct, the practice cannot be right, - Tell me what a man believes, and I will tell you what he will do." - Tryon Edwards
"Can Iraqis get this government together? If they do, I think the American public will continue to want to support the effort there to try to produce a decent, stable Iraq. But if they don't, then I think the bottom is going to fall out of public support here for the whole Iraq endeavor. So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"We reward risk taking. Our university system is competitive and experimental." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of the m ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"A Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy. King Henry IV. Part I. Act ii. Sc. 4." - William Shakespeare
"ALBANY: Well, you may fear too far. GONERIL: Safer than trust too far." - William Shakespeare
"Be merry, and employ your chiefest thoughts to courtship and such fair ostents of love as shall conveniently become you there." - William Shakespeare
"Can’t help it? Nonsense! What we are is up to us. Our bodies are like gardens and our willpower is like the gardener. Depending on what we plant—weeds or lettuce, or one kind of herb rather than a variety, the garden will either be barren and useless, or rich and productive. If we didn’t have rational minds to counterbalance our emotions and desires, our bodily urges would take over. We’d end up in ridiculous situations. Thankfully, we have reason to cool our raging lusts. In my opinion, what you call love is just an offshoot of lust. Othello, Act I, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"What we did not imagine was a Web of people, but a Web of documents." - Dale Dougherty
"By perfectible, it is not meant that he is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood. The term perfectible, thus explained, not only does not imply the capacity of being brought to perfection, but stands in express opposition to it. If we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement. There is however one thing of great importance that it does imply: every perfection or excellence that human beings are competent to conceive, human beings, unless in cases that are palpably and unequivocally excluded by the structure of their frame, are competent to attain." - William Godwin
"The other reference is to the time to come; wherein though he have never so great hope of bettering himself, yet for the present he remaineth content with his present condition." - William Gouge
"In man, then, let us take the amount that is extruded by the individual beats, and that cannot return into the heart because of the barrier set in its way by the valves, as half an ounce, or three drachms, or at least one drachm. In half an hour the heart makes over a thousand beats; indeed, in some individuals, and on occasion, two, three, or four thousand. If you multiply the drachms per beat by the number of beats you will see that in half an hour either a thousand times three drachms or times two drachms, or five hundred ounces, or other such proportionate quantity of blood has been passed through the heart into the arteries, that is, in all cases blood in greater amount than can be found in the whole of the body. Similarly in the sheep or the dog. Let us take it that one scruple passes in a single contraction of the heart; then in half an hour a thousand scruples, or three and a half pounds of blood, do so. In a body of this size, as I have found in the sheep, there is often not more than four pounds of blood." - William Harvey
"Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you." - William James
"If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd." - William James
"When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. ... His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast..." - William James
"Now since our eternal state is as certainly ours, as our present state; since we are as certainly to live forever, as we now live at all; it is plain, that we cannot judge of the value of any particular time, as to us, but by comparing it to that eternal duration, for which we are created." - William Law
"God grant indeed thy words are not for nought! Then shalt thou save me, since for many a day to such a dreadful life I have been brought: nor will I spare with all my heart to pay what man soever takes my grief away; ah! I will love thee, if thou lovest me but well enough my saviour now to be." - William Morris
"WFT-II was the only British software company that could be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines of "WFT-II, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus ..." but it was a start." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"The defects of the understanding, like those of the face, grow worse as we grow old." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki