This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence." - Thomas Merton
"The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out." - Thomas Merton
"But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide No sedge-crown'd sister now attend, Now waft me from the green hill's side Whose cold turf hides the buried friend!" - William Collins
"We wanted to step off our island and add the color of the third world. We got gold cigarette paper and stuck it around our teeth. We really did look like pirates and dressed to look the part." - Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Solitude is the play field of Satan" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Whenever you see a board up with Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespass at once." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"A dogma is a dark chamber." - Victor Hugo
"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses." - Victor Hugo
"It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper; it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep." - Victor Hugo
"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight." - William James
"The first thing people have got to do is to stop believing there's going to be any action anytime soon, ... It's obviously a prime piece of land. It's what's on the land that makes development difficult." - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"General Billot directed the judges in his preliminary remarks, and they proceeded to judgment as they would to battle, unquestioningly. The preconceived opinion they brought to the bench was obviously the following: Dreyfus was found guilty for the crime of treason by a court martial; he therefore is guilty and we, a court martial, cannot declare him innocent. On the other hand, we know that acknowledging Esterhazy's guilt would be tantamount to proclaiming Dreyfus innocent. There was no way for them to escape this rationale." - Emile Zola
"I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me - will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say, twenty years hence, “That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since - my children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!†Will you say so, Heathcliff?" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls, I perceived decay had made progress, even in seven months - many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor - the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath - Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, creeping up its foot - Heathcliff's still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"And the Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding. Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"Behind that, there was something else at work, beyond any design of the ring maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien