This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Repose without stagnation is the state most favorable to happiness. "The great felicity of life," says Seneca, "is to be without perturbations."" - Christian Nestell Bovee
"He who opens his heart to ambition closes it to repose." - Charles Cahier
"The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system, a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include al the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities, and indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences." - Thomas Chalmers
"Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on." - Frédéric Chopin, fully Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin
"Real wealth is the soul in repose." - Samuel "Sam" Hoffenstein
"The longing for certainty and repose is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion and repose is not the destiny of man." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"The toils of honor dignify repose." - John Hoole
"It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated." - David Hume
"There is no mortal truly wise and restless at once; wisdom is the repose of minds." - Johann Kaspar Lavater
"Recreation is not being idle; it is easing the wearied part by change of occupation. To re-create strength, rest. To re-create mind, repose. To re-create cheerfulness, hope in God, or change the object of attention to one more elevated and worthy of thought." - Charles Simmons
"Repose is agreeable to the human mind; and decision is repose. A man has made up his opinions; he does not choose to be disturbed; and he is much more thankful to the man who confirms him in his errors, and leaves him alone, than he is to the man who refutes him, or who instructs him at the expense of his tranquillity." - Sydney Smith
"What, what is virtue but repose of mind?" - Harold W Thompson
"What, what is virtue, but repose of mind. A pure ethereal calm, that knows no storm; above the reach of wild ambitions’ wind, above those passions that this world deform and torture man." - Edward Thomson
"There are pauses amidst study, and even pauses of seeming idleness, in which a process goes on which may be likened to the digestion of food. In those seasons of repose, the powers are gathering their strength for new efforts; as land which lies fallow recovers itself for tillage." - James Waddel Alexander
"Thou hast made us of Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless 'til they repose in Thee." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"How simply I can trust in man, and how little in God! How unreasonable is a pure act of faith in one like ourselves, if we cannot repose the same faith in God." - Richard Cecil
"The home of everyone is to him his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence, as for his repose." - Edward Cooke
"Wisdom is the repose of the mind." - Johann Kaspar Lavater
"There is no happiness for him who oppresses and persecutes; there can be no repose for him. For the sighs of the unfortunate cry for vengeance to heaven." - Johann Pestalozzi, fully Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
"Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery." - William Gilmore Simms
"Faith is not reason’s labor, but repose." - Edward Young
"It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed… Great necessities call out great virtues." - Abigail Adams
"Prayer stamps with its indelible mark our actions and demeanor. A tranquility of bearing, a facial and bodily repose are observed in those whose inner lives are thus enriched. Within the depths of consciousness a flame kindles. And man sees himself. He discovers his selfishness, his silly pride, his fear, his greeds, his blunder. He develops a sense of moral obligation, intellectual humility. Thus begins a journey of the soul toward the realm of grace." - Alexis Carrel
"Neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolations, insignificance, dependent nature, powerlessness, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair." - Blaise Pascal
"This is what I found out about religion. It gives you courage to make the decisions you must make in a crisis, and then the confidence to leave the result to Higher Power. Only by trust in God can a man carrying responsibility find repose." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor’s nose." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Do not run after happiness, but seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you. The day will dawn full of expectation, the night will fall full of repose. This world will seem a very good place, and the world to come a better place still." - James Freeman Clarke
"A just security to property is not afforded by that government under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species; where arbitrary tax invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied by an unfeeling policy as another spur; in violation of that sacred property which heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities." - James Madison
"As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite - variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite - energy. It is not the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not." - John Ruskin
"Tenderness is the repose of passion." - Joseph Joubert
"Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"Plainly this is not an age of the meditative man. It is a squinting, sprinting, shoving age. Substitutes for repose are million dollar business. Silence, already a nation's most critical shortage, is almost a nasty word. Modern man may or may not be obsolete, but he is certainly wired for sound." - Norman Cousins
"Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please and you can never have both." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please – you can never have both." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We ought to repose on Divine Providence, not only for what concerns temporal things, but much more for what relates to our spiritual life and perfection." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"A star is beautiful; it affords pleasure, not from what it is to do, or to give, but simply by being what it is. It befits the heavens; it has congruity with the mighty space in which it dwells. It has repose; no force disturbs its eternal peace. It has freedom; no obstruction lies between it and infinity." - Thomas Carlyle
"A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is necessary in conversation." - William Hazlitt
"It is not the placidity of stupid ease that we should covet, but the repose that is requisite for the renewal of exhausted strength, the serenity that succeeds the storm, and the salubrity that repays its ravages." - Elias L. Magoon
"Anger may repast with thee for an hour, but not repose for a night; the continuance of anger is hatred, the continuance of hatred turns malice. " - Francis Quarles
"There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"The repose of love is a weariness; its onset a sickness; its end, death. For me, however, death through love is life; I give thanks to my Beloved that she has held it out to me. Whoever does not die of his love is unable to live by it." - Ibn Ibn Al-Fāriḍ