This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude; but grant me still a friend in my retreat, whom I may whisper--solitude it sweet." - William Cowper
"What we admire we praise; and when we praise,advance it into notice, that its worth acknowledged, others may admire it too." - William Cowper
"Here is my Farm Relief bill: Every time a Southerner plants nothing on his farm but cotton year after year, and the Northerner nothing but wheat or corn, why, take a hammer and hit him twice right between the eyes. You may dent your hammer, but it will do more real good than all the bills you can pass in a year." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by circa 1920." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that." - Wilhelm Reich
"The moon gives you light, and the bugles and the drums give you music, and my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, my heart gives you love." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother's father the sailor told it to me." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"The prophet is engaged in a battle for language in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge." - Walter Brueggemann
"When it is faithful to Jesus, the church will see the hegemonic economic political-military-ideological force of the U.S. empire as destructive and eventually lethal." - Walter Brueggemann
"Oratory has deep agonistic roots. The development of the vast rhetorical tradition was distinctive of the west and was related, whether as cause or effect or both, to the tendency among the Greeks and their cultural epigoni to maximize oppositions, in the mental as in the extramental world: this by contrast with Indians and Chinese, who programmatically minimized them." - Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
"A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius." - Walter Savage Landor
"Hope is the mother of faith." - Walter Savage Landor
"Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade." - Walter Savage Landor
"In one of his traditional sermons transmitted by his disciples, is the following apologue on the subject of charity: When God created the earth it shook and trembled, until he put mountains upon it, to make it firm. Then the angels asked, ' O God, is there anything of thy creation stronger than these mountains? ' And God replied, ' Iron is stronger than the mountains; for it breaks them.' 'And is there anything of thy creation stronger than iron ? ' 'Yes ; fire is stronger than iron, for it melts it.' 'Is there anything of thy creation stronger than fire?' 'Yes; water, for it quenches fire.' 'O Lord, is there anything of thy creation stronger than water ? ' ' Yes, wind; for it overcomes water and puts it in motion.' 'O, our Sustainer! is there anything of thy creation stronger than wind ? ' ' Yes, a good man giving alms ; if he give with his right hand and conceal it from his left, he overcomes all things.'" - Washington Irving
"Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use." - Washington Irving
"The morning is not the time to praise a fine day." - Welsh Proverbs
"The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves." - Wendell Berry
"Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it's like some hidden assassin, waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Say this city has ten million souls, some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"She was my North, my South, my East and West my working week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"In every big city there is always one surefire laugh, and that lies in hanging some piece of idiocy upon the people of a nearby city or town." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Moreover, the slogan "highbrows and lowbrows, unite!", which he had spouted already, is all wrong since true highbrows are highbrows because they do not unite." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Speaking of novels,’ I said, ‘you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described—by Cocteau, I think—as a mirage of suspended gardens, and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but—and now let me finish sweetly—we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking human interest: it is there, it is there—maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The answer to all questions of life and death, the absolute solution was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveler realizing that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language... Thus the traveler spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one's earthly existence, with one's brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one's own personality - one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In every author let us distinguish the man from his works." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise." - Virgil Thomson
"It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth, one subterfuge was tried after another … sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"No stranger to misfortune myself, I have learned to relieve the sufferings of others." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"The reason a man must awaken is because it is dangerous to sleep, as man's present life proves." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Intolerance is to be found even among philosophers, and censorship even among democrats." - Victor Hugo
"This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"You may have huge hordes of men in the army; but they are useful only when the few Generals who lead them know where they are and whether they should proceed and how to overcome the enemy, whose strength and weakness they have comprehended. Hordes of people sing, recite, adore, worship, praise and prostrate, but these are the soldiers." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Vasana perishes through well conducted deliberation and truth. Through the absorption of Vasanas mind attains quiescence like a lamp without oil. - Mukti Upanishad" - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
"Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him — in new clothing — his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos." - Václav Havel
"The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?" - Vannevar Bush
"If our friends do us a service, we think they owe it to us by their title of friend. We never think that they do not owe us their friendship." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The slanderer and the assassin differ only in the weapon they use; with the one it is the dagger, with the other the tongue. The former is worse that the latter, for the last only kills the body, while the other murders the reputation." - Tryon Edwards
"It seems unspeakably important that all persons among us, and especially the student and the writer, should be pervaded with Americanism. Americanism includes the faith that national self-government is not a chimera, but that, with whatever inconsistencies and drawbacks, we are steadily establishing it here. It includes the faith that to this good thing all other good things must in time be added. When a man is heartily imbued with such a national sentiment as this, it is as marrow in his bones and blood in his veins. He may still need culture, but he has the basis of all culture. He is entitled to an imperturbable patience and hopefulness, born of a living faith. All that is scanty in our intellectual attainments, or poor in our artistic life, may then be cheerfully endured: if a man sees his house steadily rising on sure foundations, he can wait or let his children wait for the cornice and the frieze. But if one happens to be born or bred in America without this wholesome confidence, there is no happiness for him; he has his alternative between being unhappy at home and unhappy abroad; it is a choice of martyrdoms for himself, and a certainty of martyrdom for his friends." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder