This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colors." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"But if one day you do not come to breakfast time, if I catch you through some mirror looking another look, if for nothing rattles phone in your room deserted, then, after untold anguish (as the madness of the human heart no end) find another be like you, find someone else who will be fit. Meanwhile, try to abolish at one stroke the ticking of time. Get close closer to me." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"To him the idea of life was not distinct from the idea of Cosette; he had decreed in his heart that he would not accept the one without the other, and he was unalterably determined to demand from anybody, no matter whom, who might wish to compel him to live, from his grandfather, from Fate, even from Hell, the restitution of his vanished Eden." - Victor Hugo
"There are three types of knowledge: Knowledge of matter-energy; knowledge of mental energy; and knowledge of cosmic energy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Socrates said, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.” He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud an heroic deed." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"What will matter is the good we did, not the good we expected others to do." - Elizabeth Lesser
"Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"For the belief in God is merely the outcome of the belief in man. God is the apex of the pyramid, not the base. Man is the corner- stone; and from the true conception of man have the Jewish thinkers risen to the noblest conception of the Deity. Those are shallow who talk of their agnosticism and parade their atheism. No one is an agnostic and no one is an atheist, except he have neither pity for the weak nor charity for the erring; except he have no mercy for those who need its soothing balm." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary." - Emil M. Cioran
"Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being. In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life." - Ernest Becker
"Human reason feels at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Maybe one morning, walking in an air of glass arid, addressing, see the miracle: nothing behind me, the void behind me with a drunkard's terror." - Eugenio Montale
"The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present." - Eugenio Montale