This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
You are the greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate.
Books | Experience | Life | Life | Mind | Peace | People | Wisdom |
The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
Henry Wotton, fully Sir Henry Wotton
How happy is he born or taught, That serveth not another’s will; Whose armor is his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill! Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all. You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies,— What are you when the moon shall rise? An itch of disputing will prove the scab of churches. I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuff. Idle time not idly spent. Now all nature seemed in love, and birds had drawn their valentines.
Character | Happy | Nature | People | Skill | Thought | Time | Truth | Will |
Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice.
Action | Choice | Evil | Good | Knowledge | Nature | Necessity | People | Poetry | Wisdom |
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For it, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.
Awe | Death | Earth | Eternal | God | History | Life | Life | Power | Silence | Sorrow | Wisdom | God |
Security is never absolute... The government of a free people must take certain chances for the sake of maintaining freedom which the government of a police state avoids because it holds freedom to be of no value.
Absolute | Freedom | Government | People | Security | Wisdom | Government |
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
We must remember that the people do not belong to the government but that governments belong to the peoples.
Government | People | Wisdom | Government |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
Anyone who is thoroughly familiar with the language and literature of a people cannot be wholly its enemy.
Enemy | Language | Literature | People | Wisdom |
Do not grieve. Misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best of men. Death will come, always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and what cannot be prevented should not be grieved for... Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our lives - they grow everywhere.
Death | Men | Nations | Past | People | Spirit | Will | Wisdom |