This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." - William Haley, fully Sir William John Haley
"Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love. It is well worth while to learn how to win the heart of a man the right way... Excite them by your civilities, and show them that you desire nothing more than their satisfaction; oblige with all your soul that friend who has made you a present of his own." - Socrates NULL
"An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success." - Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point , the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. The inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and outer compulsion, yet surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light still and moving..." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"To each individual in the world will take on a different connotation of meaning - the importance lies in the desire to search for an answer." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"You must know that ethical conduct is inspired neither by hope of reward nor fear of punishment. It stems solely from the love of God and the desire to do His commandments." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Anger is rooted in our lack of understanding of ourselves and of the causes, deep-seated as well as immediate, that brought about this unpleasant state of affairs. Anger is also rooted in desire, pride, agitation and suspicion. The primary roots of our anger are in ourselves. Our environment and other people are only secondary. It is not difficult for us to accept the enormous damage brought abut by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a flood. But when damage is caused by another person, we don’t have much patience. We know that earthquakes and floods have causes, and we should see that the person who has precipitated our anger also has reasons, deep-seated and immediate, for what he has done." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"All men desire peace but few indeed desire those things which make for peace." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"There are many persons who desire the contemplative life, but they will not practice the things which lead to it." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values." - Thomas Arnold
"The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die decently, but to live manfully." - Thomas Carlyle
"The highest conceivable form of human society is that in which the desire to do what is best for the whole, dominates and limits the action of every member of that society." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely thins and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of eh affections and of the will to an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"We live in a world that trusts logic, and from that commitment we distrust desire; but if we lived in a world that validated desire, we would know how to trust it." - Thomas Moore
"Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought." - Thucydides NULL
"The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe of the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.” Love is not, but its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble and unrewarded." - Wendell Berry
"Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots." - William Butler Yeats
"Land of Heart's Desire, where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, but joy is wisdom, Time an endless song." - William Butler Yeats
"To seek God too soon is not less sinful than to seek God too late; we must love, man, woman or child, we must exhaust ambition, intellect, desire, dedicating all things as they pass, or we come to God with empty hands." - William Butler Yeats
"If we should venture to name this deep-set desire which we call religious it might be represented as an ultimate demand for self-preservation; it is man’s leap for eternal life in some form, in presence of an awakened fear of fate." - William Ernest Hocking
"It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved." - William Hazlitt
"A strong passion for any object will ensure success, and it is the desire of the end that will point out the means." - William Hazlitt
"It is better to desire than to enjoy - to love than to be loved." - William Hazlitt
"To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be devout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness." - William Law
"Even on the path to God, All is God. You are freed from your own desires only when God frees you. This is not effected by your own exertion, but by the grace of God... Then you entirely recognize that you do not have the right to say “I” or “mine.” At this stage you behold your helplessness; desires fall away from you and you become free and calm. You desire what God desires; your own desires are gone, you are emancipated from your wants, and I have gained peace and joy in both worlds. First, action is necessary, then knowledge, in order that you may know that you know nothing and are no one. This is not easy to know. It is a thing that cannot be rightly learned by instruction, nor sewed on with needle nor tied on with thread. It is the gift of God." - Abu Sa’id ibn abi Khayr
"If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Man is born ignorant of the causes of things and... he has a desire, of which he is conscious, to seek that which is profitable to him... The attempt, however, to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is to say, nothing which is not profitable to man), seems to end in showing that nature, the gods, and man are alike mad." -
"All human activity is prompted by desire." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most efficient means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor without feeling the same necessities; say, rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world. " - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s desire... But we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event - which lies in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it - to be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled. " -
"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavour. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire." -
"All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one." - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
"Let us examine more closely the significance of this vague word, reality. It may have several meanings, according to the different points of view which one takes. We may regard it as embodied in the physical world, the world of land and sea, of sky and trees, of sunshine and of storm. The real therefore will be to us that which we can touch and see, smell and taste, as one will say, "I know that is real for I can see it with my eyes." Seeing is believing, and the testimony of the senses is the superior court of appeal in controverted questions. But the world of reality may be regarded from quite a different point of view, as the world of consciousness, the mind of man, the experiences of the inner self, the Ego. Here is a world of phenomena interrelated and reciprocally dependent. It is a realm of ideas, of memory images, of fancy, of will, and of desire. The verities in this world cannot be seen, or measured, or weighed, and yet we do not hesitate to speak of them as realities; they are real as the love of friends is real, or the anger of a foe. The passion of a Romeo, the will of a Napoleon, the genius of a Goethe ... these are realities." - John Grier Hibben
"The body is likened to a small city: like two kings who wage war over a city, each desiring to capture it and rule over it, that is, to govern its inhabitants according to his will so that they obey him in all that he decrees for them, so do the two souls - the G‑dly [soul] and the animal [soul] - wage war against each other over the body and all its organs and limbs. The desire and will of the G‑dly soul is that it alone should rule over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey it and surrender themselves completely to it and become a vehicle for it, and serve as a vehicle for its ten faculties [of intellect and emotion] and three "garments" [thought, speech and action]... and the entire body should be permeated with them alone, to the exclusion of any alien influence, G‑d forbid... While the animal soul desires the very opposite." - Shneur Zalman of Liadi
"True charity is the desire to be useful to others with no thought of recompense." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be some time. Let is first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are." - Eric Hoffer
"By necrophilia is meant love for all that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction to death, to suicide, to sadism; the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic by means of "order." The necrophile, lacking the necessary qualities to create, in his impotence finds it easy to destroy because for him it serves only one quality: force." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"Two trends will cycle high in our culture: cocooning, our desire to shelter ourselves from the harsh realities of our world, and fantasy adventure, our hunger for the new and unconventional." - Faith Popcorn, born Faith Plotkin
"An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment. " - Felix Adler
"So we see, to play successfully the game of life, we must train the imaging faculty. A person with an imaging faculty trained to image only good, brings into his life "every righteous desire of his heart" - health, wealth, love, friends, perfect self-expression, his highest ideals." - Florence Scovel Shinn
"The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." -
"We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us. " - François Rabelais