This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off." - Thomas Paine
"Amid so much war and contest and variety of opinion, you will find one consenting conviction in every land, that there is one God, the King and Father of all." - Maximus of Tyre, fully Cassius Maximus Tyrius NULL
"A knave is one who disobeys the imperatives of conscience; a fool is one who cannot hear or understand them." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Faith in all its sheer simplicity! Faith that takes God precisely at His Word! Faith that simply says, "Thank You."" - W. Ian Thomas, fully Walter Ian Thomas
"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat — a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"Man’s own form in space – his body – was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery – because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy." - Willem de Kooning
"Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does." - Willem de Kooning
"Hebraism and Hellenism – between these two points of influence moves our world." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett
"I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is - the enormous prosperity of Fools." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such unquestionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"A government treaty gave Cherokees their land as long as the grass grows and the water flows, but when they discovered oil, they took it back because there was nuthin' in the treaty about oil." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Some people spend a lifetime juggling with words, with not an idea in a carload." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"A human being is the best computer available to place in a spacecraft. . . It is also the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
"Am I a space man? Do I belong to a new race on Earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with Earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race? Has the melting-pot of interplanetary society already been created on our planet, as the melting-pot of all Earth nations was established in the U.S. A. 190 years ago?" - Wilhelm Reich
"Work democracy does not wish to prevent or prohibit anything. Its only intention is the fulfilment of the biological life functions, of love, work and knowledge." - Wilhelm Reich
"The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me.) While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wondrous thoughts, of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"There is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now; and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows, the air tastes good to my palate. Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising, freshly exuding, scooting obliquely high and low." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin." - Washington Irving
"What if the healing of the world utterly depends on the ten-thousand invisible kindnesses we offer simply and quietly throughout the pilgrimage of each human life?" - Wayne Muller
"If we clearly apperceive the difference between direct apprehension in Whole-mind and relative comprehension by reasoning in mind divided into subject-and-object, all the apparent mysteries will disappear. For that will be found to be the key which unlocks the doors of incomprehension." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"And none will hear the postman’s knock without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?" - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it for the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?" - Walker Percy
"If there is a man white as marble sits in a wood, in the greenest part, brooding sounds of the images of death, so there is a man in black space sits in nothing that we know, brooding sounds of river noises." - Wallace Stevens
"The honey of heaven may or may not come, but that of earth both comes and goes at once." - Wallace Stevens
"The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"A good man fallen among Fabians." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Every cook has to learn how to govern the state." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends. We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently we'll integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The philosophy of a football man’s life should be God, family and football." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"What is done in love is done well." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves..." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"There are three types of knowledge: Knowledge of matter-energy; knowledge of mental energy; and knowledge of cosmic energy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"But, fortunately for mankind, the neat rents of the land, under a system of private property, can never be diminished by the progress of cultivation." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson