This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.
Body | Children | Language | Memory | Mind | Play | Recreation | Thinking | Time | Child |
It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Spiritual traditions have tended to look at the world in four major ways: as a battlefield, as a trap, as a lover, and as the self. The first two - as a stage set for our moral battles or as a prison to escape - are probably familiar, and have in many ways contributed to our lack of care for the world. But what of the other two? Might they shed some useful light on life in an interconnected world?
Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts.
As you think, you travel; and as you love, you attract. You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You cannot escape the result of your thoughts, but you can endure and learn, can accept and be glad... Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less.
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
Change |
It is not that you must be free from fear. The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear. Resistance, in any form,does not end fear. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it through courage and so on.
Courage | Understanding | Learn |
Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.
Life | Life | Wants | Understand |
Lawren Harris, fully Lawren Stewart Harris
Art is not an amusement, nor a distraction, nor is it, as many men maintain, an escape from life. On the contrary, it is a high training of the soul, essential to the soul's growth, to its unfoldment.
Learned Hand, fully Billings Learned Hand
I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.
Chance | Detection | Rumor | Spirit | Suspicion | Will | Gossip |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection.
Order |
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
Age | Death | Destiny | Dread | Earth | Ends | Enough | Kill | Life | Life | Madness | Man | Music | Old age | Silence | Strength | Time | Tomorrow | Truth | Will | Youth | Youth | Old |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone.
Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.
Learning |