This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the tribe passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations.
Perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals… foolproof prescriptions for fulfillment and meaningful lives. The futile quest to become a complete all-round wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness.
Control | Culture | Danger | Feelings | Fulfillment | Health | Ideals | Self | Wealth | Danger |
Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft.
Art | Character | Civility | Culture | Day | Men | People | Right | Society | Wisdom | Wise | Society |
To lead, you have to make a declaration of independence against the estimation of others, the culture, the age. You have to decide to live in the world, but outside existing conceptions of it. Leaders do not merely do well by the terms of their culture they create new contexts, new things, new ways of doing and being.
Age | Culture | Estimation | World |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations.
Appreciation | Conversation | Culture | Education | Family | Life | Life | Literature | Music | Nature | Need | People | Poetry | Practice | Virtue | Virtue | Appreciation |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Intemperate eating kills more people than tobacco and alcohol, because it is the most widespread fault… If people knew how to eat properly they would retain their youthful resiliency much longer.
We can flow along with the mainstream of a culture that does not serve us well – does not really make us comfortable, does not really make us safe; but only offers illusions of happiness, comfort, safety – or we can begin the oftentimes prickly work of searching our own hearts, of asking who and what we love, who and what we feel strongly enough about to change our lives for, to fight for, to live for.
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Knowledge creates doubt, and doubt makes you ravenous for more knowledge. You can’t get full eating this way. The wise person dines on something more subtle: he eats the understanding that the named was born from the unnamed, that all being flows from non-being, that the describable world emanates from an indescribable source. He finds this subtle truth inside his own self, and becomes completely content.
Doubt | Knowledge | Self | Truth | Understanding | Wise | World |
Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
Virtues transcend time and culture (although their cultural expression may vary); justice and kindness, for example, will always and everywhere be virtues, regardless of how many people exhibit them.
Culture | Example | Justice | Kindness | People | Time | Will |
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.
Culture |