This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point - a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions - women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unresolved problems." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"But the root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea…. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape… You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"Let me rage before I die." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"A weakness natural to superior and to little men, when they have committed a fault, is to wish to make it pass as a work of genius, a vast combination which the vulgar cannot comprehend. Pride says these things and folly credits them." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Without taste genius is only a sublime kind of folly. That sure touch which the lyre gives back the right note and nothing more, is even a rarer gift than the creative faculty itself." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Money comes and... goes. But morality? It comes and grows. Morality has to be grown in the heart by feeding it with Love; then only we can have justice, security, law and order." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I cannot make decisions about things it is not proper for him to decide. He is merely putting in a good word for genuine peace, and for achieving it quickly." - Václav Havel
"Only the timid and the weak leave things to destiny (daivam) but the strong and the self-confident never bank on destiny or luck (bhagya)" - Valmiki NULL
"The efforts of one who is unenthusiastic, weak and immersed in sorrow cannot bring out any good and he comes to grief." - Valmiki NULL
"Fools do not understand men of intelligence." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The need poisons the evils it cannot heal." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Few men are more to be shunned than those who have time, but know not how to improve it, and so spend it in wasting the time of their neighbors, talking forever though they have nothing to say." - Tryon Edwards
"To be good, we must do good and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power." - Tryon Edwards
"To possess money is very well; it may be a most valuable servant; to be possessed by it, is to be possessed by a devil, and one of the meanest and worst kind of devils." - Tryon Edwards
"Pull one hair and the whole body is affected." - Hung Tzu-ch'eng, also Hong Zicheng or Hóng Zìchéng, born Hong Yingming
"Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time." - Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
"I saw before me, sitting on the counter, a handsome, burly man, heavily built, and not looking, to my gymnasium-trained eye, in really good condition for athletic work. I perhaps felt a little prejudiced against him from having read ‘‘Leaves of Grass’’ on a voyage, in the early stages of seasickness,—a fact which doubtless increased for me the intrinsic unsavoriness of certain passages. But the personal impression made on me by the poet was not so much of manliness as of Boweriness, if I may coin the phrase. . . . This passing impression did not hinder me from thinking of Whitman with hope and satisfaction at a later day when regiments were to be raised for the war, when the Bowery seemed the very place to enlist them. . . . When, however, after waiting a year or more, Whitman decided that the proper post for him was hospital service, I confess to feeling a reaction, which was rather increased than diminished by his profuse celebration of his own labors in that direction. Hospital attendance is a fine thing, no doubt, yet if all men, South and North, had taken the same view of their duty that Whitman held, there would have been no occasion for hospitals on either side." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"A collision at sea will ruin your entire day." - Thucydides NULL
"Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness. It has been remarked that transports of intemperate mirth are often no more than flashes from the dark cloud; and that in proportion to the violence of the effulgence is the succeeding gloom. Levity may be the forced production of folly or vice; cheerfulness is the natural offspring of wisdom and virtue only. The one is an occasional agitation; the other a permanent habit. The one degrades the character; the other is perfectly consistent with the dignity of reason, and the steady and manly spirit of religion. To aim at a constant succession of high and vivid sensations of pleasure is an idea of happiness perfectly chimerical. Calm and temperate enjoyment is the utmost that is allotted to man. Beyond this we struggle in vain to raise our state; and in fact depress our joys by endeavoring to heighten them. Instead of those fallacious hopes of perpetual festivity with which the world would allure us, religion confers upon us a cheerful tranquillity. Instead of dazzling us with meteors of joy which sparkle and expire, it sheds around us a calm and steady light, more solid, more equal, and more lasting." - Hugh Blair
"I will not go so far as to say that the improvement of taste and of virtue is the same, or that they may always be expected to co-exist in an equal degree. More powerful correctives than taste can apply are necessary for reforming the corrupt propensities which too frequently prevail among mankind. Elegant speculations are sometimes found to float on the surface of the mind while bad passions possess the interior regions of the heart. At the same time, this cannot but be admitted, that the exercise of taste is, in its native tendency, moral and purifying." - Hugh Blair
"True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us, and to the common nature which we all share. - It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of men. - It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle." - Hugh Blair
"Whatever purifies the heart also fortifies it." - Hugh Blair
"Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do." - William James
"Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior ." - William James
"Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose." - William James
"I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds." - William James
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." - William James
"No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed." - William James
"No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts." - William James
"Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self." - William James
"Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world." - William James
"The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one." - William James
"The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible." - William James
"The faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction." - William James
"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation." - William James
"Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." - William James
"Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than pleasures of youth." - William Matthews
"The language of women should be luminous, but not voluminous." - Douglas William Jerrold
"Let a woman retire late to bed, but rise early to duties; let her nor dread tasks by day or by night. Let her not refuse to perform domestic duties whether easy or difficult. That which must be done, let her finish completely, tidily, and systematically, When a woman follows such rules as these, then she may be said to be industrious." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
"A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington." - Edwin Percy Whipple