This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"This world is a prison for the Faithful, but a Paradise for unbelievers." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL
"You will not enter paradise until you have faith. And you will not complete your faith until you love one another." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL
"If there be a paradise for virtues, there must be a hell for crimes." - Nicolas Caussin
"Those who have died, entered the paradise between births, are in a condition resembling meditation without an external object. But in the fullness of time, the seeds of desire in them will spring up, and they will be born again into this world. " - Patañjali NULL
"To work with God's happiness bubbling in the soul is to carry a portable paradise within you wherever you go." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future… It isn't expectations that carry us forward; it's our desire to go on… It is not the life that matters, but the journey… Paradise is being able to say at that (second before our death) moment: I made some mistakes, but I wasn't a coward. I lived life and did what I had to do… People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly." - Paulo Coelho
"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment." - Peter Matthiessen
"If there is anything that will endure The eye of God because it still is pure, It is the spirit of a little child, Fresh from His hand, and therefore undefiled. Nearer the gate of Paradise than we, Our children breathe its airs, its angels see; And when they pray God hears their simple prayer, Yea, even sheathes His sword, in judgment bare" - R. H. Stoddard, fully Richard Henry Stoddard
"Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional next world is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them." - Richard Dawkins
"Your worth can be estimated by what you seek. If you seek a dog, your worth is that of a dog. Whoever worship God because he desires heaven is a slave of his own desire. Whoever worships Him out of fear of hell is a slave of hell, for anyone who is afraid of something is a slave of that thing." - Sharafuddin Ahmad ibn Yahya Maneri, fully Hazrat Makhdum Shaikh Sharafuddin Yahya Maneri
"The talents lost--the moments run To waste--the sins of act, of thought, Ten thousand deeds of folly done, And countless virtues cherish'd not." - John Bowring, fully Sir John Bowring
"What does this patch-sewing mean you ask? Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food and other ego-satisfactions." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Our wisdom comes from our experience, and our experience comes from our foolishness." - Sacha Guitry, fully Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry
"A person can do other things against his will; but belief is possible only in one who is willing." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"The rule and life of these brothers is this: to live in obedience, in chastity, and without anything of their own, and to follow the teaching and the footprints of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who says: 'If you wish to be perfect go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.' And, 'If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me'. Again, 'If anyone wishes to come to me and does not hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple' (Lk. 14:26). And: 'Everyone who has left father or mother, brothers or sisters, wife or children, houses or lands because of me, shall receive a hundredfold and shall possess eternal life' (cf. Mt. 19:29, Mk. 10:29, Lk. 18:30)" - Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone NULL
"As long as you have feet, run after work, before you are bound with that bond which cannot be loosed again once it is put on. As long as you have hands, stretch them out to Heaven in prayer, before your arms fall from their joints, and though you desire to draw them up, you will not be able. As long as you have fingers, cross yourself in prayer, before death comes loosening the comely strength of their sinews. As long as you have eyes, fill them with tears before that hour when dust will cover your black clothes and your eyes will be fixed in one direction in an unseeing gaze and you will not know it. Yes, fill your eyes with tears as long as your heart is controlled by the power of discernment and before your soul is shaken by her departure from it and the heart is left like a house deserted by its owner." - Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
"Divine Providence is never wanting in things undertaken at its command. Even though the whole world should rise up and destroy us, nothing could happen but what is pleasing to God. The less there is of man in affairs, the more there is of God." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"In horror, in terror, she accepted the metamorphosis — gnat, foam, ant, until death. And it's only the beginning, she thought. She stood motionless, as if it were possible to play tricks with time, possible to stop it from following its course. But her hands stiffened against her quivering lips. When the bells began to sound the hour she let out the first scream." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"The best way to do ourselves good is to be doing good to others; the best way to gather is to scatter." - Thomas Brooks
"Who's in the next room? - who? I seemed to see somebody in the dawning passing through, unknown to me." - Thomas Hardy
"The right of self-government does not comprehend the government of others." - Thomas Jefferson
"I think the chief reason we have so little joy is that we take ourselves too seriously." - Thomas Merton
"Honest men are the soft easy cushions on which knaves repose and fatten." - Thomas Otway
"With the welfare of the Irish people my heart and feelings are identified, and to. this object, in all its latitude, have my pen and my knowledge of their character been directed. I found them a class unknown in literature, unknown by their own landlords, and unknown by those in whose hands much of their destiny was placed. If I became the historian of their habits and manners, their feelings, their prejudices, their superstitions, and their crimes; if I have attempted to delineate their moral, religious, and physical state, it was because I saw no other person willing to undertake a task which surely must be looked upon as an important one. I had also other motives. I was anxious that those who ought, but did not, understand their character, should know them - [x] not merely for selfish purposes, but that they should teach them to know themselves and appreciate their rights, both moral and civil, as rational men, who owe obedience to law, without the necessity of being slaves either to priest or landlord: such is the position in which I wish to see them. There is little prospect, however, of this. Even since the period in which these stories were written, now so short a time since, a gloomy change has come over them. The pestilent poison of mercenary agitation, joined to the neglect of landlords and the interference of priests, has created a reaction which threatens to trample - and does trample - law, morals, and religion, under foot. How it may end, it is impossible to say; but God grant that it may be for the best!" - William Carleton
"Dream after dream ensues; and still they dream that they shall still succeed; and still are disappointed." - William Cowper
"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"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
"Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of ghoul, feeding in the charnel house of decayed literature." - Washington Irving
"When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquility in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness." - Washington Irving
"And the beauty of the moonlight falling there, falling as sleep falls in the innocent air." - Wallace Stevens
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind." - Wallace Stevens
"But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I've had some experience of this love, this love that rules our hearts, which is the soul of our souls, all it got me was a kiss and twenty kicks in the ass. How could so beautiful to causes have produced in you such an abominable effect?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"For love… has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"And why is it that some men just can't deal with the idea that a smart, together, professional woman like me can actually deserve their respect and still want to be thrown down on the couch and pounded like a cheap steak now and then?" - Victor Hugo
"You can't run a water mill by carrying water. (Meaning: It is futile to start a business if you don't have a sustainable source or you can't sustain a life style with borrowed money.)" - Turkish Proverbs
"Ay, every inch a king: when I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. — What was thy cause? — Adultery? — Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive; for Gloster's bastard son was kinder to his father than my daughters got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers. — Behold yond simpering dame, whose face between her forks presages snow; that minces virtue, and does shake the head to hear of pleasure's name; — the fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more riotous appetite down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend's; there's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption! — fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there's money for thee. King Lear, Act iv, Scene 6" -
"A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity." - William James
"The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest." - William James
"For Queen Diana did my body change into a fork-tongued dragon flesh and fell, and through the island nightly do I range, or in the green sea mate with monsters strange, when in the middle of the moonlit night the sleepy mariner I do affright." - William Morris
"The life of the husbandman, - a life fed by the bounty of earth and sweetened by the airs of heaven." - Douglas William Jerrold
"A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions." - Emil M. Cioran
"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world." - Emil M. Cioran