This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
May the heads of all countries and races be guided to understand that men of all nations are physically and spiritually one: physically one, be- cause we are the descendants of common parents --- the symbolic Adam and Eve; and spiritually one, because we are the immortal children of our Father, bound by eternal links of brotherhood. Let us pray in our hearts for a League of Souls and a United World. Though we may seem divided by race, creed, color, class, and political prejudices, still, as children of the one God we are able in our souls to feel brotherhood and world unity. May we work for the creation of a United World in which every nation will be a useful part, guided by God through man's enlightened conscience. In our hearts we can all learn to be free from hate and selfishness. Let us pray for harmony among the nations, that they march hand in hand through the gate of a fair new civilization.
Brotherhood | Children | Eternal | God | Men | Nations | Will | Work | World | God | Learn | Understand |
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.
Work |
Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
Anecdotally, when Oppenheimer was working at Göttingen, Dirac supposedly came to him one day and said: Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say... something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
You alone are responsible for yourself. No one else may answer for your deeds when the final reckoning comes. You work in the world - in the sphere where your karma, your own past activity, has placed you - can be performed only by one person: yourself.
Food for Thought... I am your constant companion. I am your greatest asset or heaviest burden. I will push you up to success or down to disappointment. I am at your command. Half the things you do might just as well be turned over to me, For I can do them quickly, correctly, and profitably. I am easily managed; just be firm with me. Those who are great, I have made great. Those who are failures, I have made failures. I am not a machine, though I work with the precision of a Machine and the intelligence of a person. You can run me for profit, or you can run me for ruin. Show me how you want it done. Educate me. Train me. Lead me. Reward me. And I will then...do it automatically. I am your servant. Who am I? I am a habit.
Intelligence | Precision | Reward | Success | Will | Work | Precision |
The presence of evil in his life provokes him into either overcoming it or yielding to it. If the first, it has led him to work for his own improvement; if the second it has led him to acknowledge his own weakness. Sooner or later, the unpleasant consequences of such weakness will lead him to grapple with it, and develop his power of will... Immediately and directly; it may either strengthen him or weaken him. Ultimately, it can only strengthen him.
Consequences | Evil | Life | Life | Power | Weakness | Will | Work | Yielding |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?
Work |
Genius sits in a glass house -- but in an unbreakable one --conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches out its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck. (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. New art, it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in ism.)
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
I believed, rather more accurately, that a work resolutely thought out and sought for in the hazards of the mind, systematically, and through a determined analysis of definite and previously prescribed conditions, whatever its value might be once it had been produced, did not leave the mind of its creator without having modified him, and forced him to recognize and in some way reorganize himself. I said to myself that it was not the accomplished work, and its appearance and effect in the world that can fulfill and edify us; but only the way in which we have done it.
Appearance | Mind | Thought | Work | World | Thought | Value |
Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
We have to realize that a unified theory of the physical world simply does not exist. We have theories that work in restricted regions, we have purely formal attempts to condense them into a single formula, we have lots of unfounded claims (such as the claim that all of chemistry can be reduced to physics), phenomena that do not fit into the accepted framework are suppressed; in physics, which many scientists regard as the one really basic science, we have now at least three different point of view (relativity, dealing with the very large, quantum theory for an intermediate domain and various particle models for the very small) without a promise of conceptual (and not only formal) unification; perceptions are outside of the material universe (the mind-body problem is still unsolved) - from the very beginning the salesman of a universal truth cheated people into admissions instead of clearly arguing for their philosophy. And let us not forget that it was they and not the representatives of the traditions they attacked who introduced argument as the one and only universal arbiter. They praised argument - they constantly violated its principles.
Argument | Beginning | People | Phenomena | Promise | Regard | Theories | Truth | Universe | Work | World |
Paul Johann Feuerbach, fully Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach
If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism -- at least in the sense of this work -- is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
Atheism | Divinity | Intention | Nothing | Religion | Sense | Truth | Work |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's — peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!
Originality | Public | Wants | Work |
It is one thing to decry the rat race...that is the good and honorable work of moralists. It is quite another thing to quit the rat race, to drop out, to refuse to run any further--that is the work of the individualist. It is offensive because it is impolite it makes the rebuke personal the individualist calls not his or her behavior into question, but mine.
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
Work |
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
The work of a man is the explanation of the man.
It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It’s already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build.
Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool.
Impression | Search | Work |