This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with...
Beauty | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Pleasure | Receive | Will | World | Beauty |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.
Learning | Life | Life | People | Wants | Happiness | Learn | Understand |
Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated.
Art | Difficulty | Guarantee | Learning | Life | Life | Spirit | Will | Art | Child | Learn |
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else.
Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding... We are learning that war doesn't need enthusiasm, doesn't need conviction, doesn't need hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise.
Care | Cause | Enough | Government | Learning | Need | Position | Wants | War | Will | Government |
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias — they let me in.
Learning |
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You
Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West
It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.
Learning |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime ...walk your own path, as you please.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn't make sense right away.
Experience | Learning | Right | Sense |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.
Learning |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise.
Excellence | Learning | Need | Excellence |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Mistakes - call them unexpected learning experiences.
Learning |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is speaking to his young fledgling son who is learning to fly: You will begin to touch heaven . . . in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there. . . . To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived. . . . The trick is to stop seeing yourself as trapped inside a limited body that has a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick is to know that your true nature lives, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.
Body | Heaven | Knowing | Learning | Nature | Perfection | Space | Will |
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!
But it's never too late, or too early, to be happy -- a message Carlson wants everybody to listen to. There is a big payoff to learning to be happier... You handle your parents better, you handle your peer pressure, you handle life in general with a lot more equanimity, and it just gets to be a lot more fun.
Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
Let anyone who possesses a vivid imagination and a highly-wrought nervous system, even now, in this century, with all the advantages of learning and science, go and sit among the rocks, or in the depths of the wood, and think of immortality, and all that that word really means, and by-and-by a mysterious awe will creep into the mind, and it will half believe in the possibility of seeing or meeting something -- something -- it knows not exactly what.
Awe | Imagination | Learning | Will | Think |