This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Joy to the world! the Lord is come;Let earth receive her King. Let ev'ry heart prepare Him room,And heav'n and nature sing," - Isaac Watts
"Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible—nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where by beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history. " - Jacques Cousteau, formally Hacques-Yves Cousteau, known as 'le Commandant Cousteau' or 'Captain Cousteau'
"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!" -
"The nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals. " - Georges Cuvier, fully Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier
"The surface of the earth is not simply a stage on which the thousands of present and past inhabitants played their parts in turn. There are much more intimate relations between the earth and the living organisms which populated it, and it may even be demonstrated that the earth was developed because of them. " - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
"The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"Can any thing in this world be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth can come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!" - Jeremy Taylor
"We want everything. All the happiness that earth and heaven are capable of bestowing. Creature comforts, and heart and soul comforts also; and, proud-spirited beings that we are, we will not be put off with a part. Give us only everything, and we will be content." - Jerome K. Jerome, fully Jerome Klapka Jerome
"Because the relationship between self and world is reciprocal, it is not a matter of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us. No need to wait. As we care enough to take risks, we loosen the grip of ego and begin to come home to our true nature. For in the co-arising nature of things, the world itself, if we are bold enough to love it, acts through us. It does not ask us to be pure or perfect, or wait until we are detached from all passions, but only to care to harness the sweet, pure intention of our deepest passions..." - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
"Nothing is more common on earth than to deceive and be deceived. " - Johann Gottfried Seume
"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky, Before the sun came out. You cannot touch the clouds, you know but you feel the rain and know How glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either, But you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything." - Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
"I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars." - Johannes Kepler
"If heaven is our country, what is the earth but a place of exile? If the departure out of the world is but an entrance into life, what is the world but a sepulchre? What is a continuance in it but an absorption in death? " - John Calvin
"I was here on earth because I chose to be." - John Cheever, fully John William Cheever
"The human being is uniquely graced with the ability to search the soul and reflect, For what purpose am I alive? Does my life have a meaning, a reason? Is there a need for my existence? Will anything on earth be impaired by my disappearance? Would my absence create a vacuum in the world? And if we say that there would be a void and an impairment in the world, and that this means that my life has value beyond its simple existence, is it incumbent upon me to fulfill a purpose in this life? Do I exist that I might build or restore?" - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"We are pilgrims, not settlers; this earth is our inn, not our home." - John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent
"What is this thing called life? I believe that the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life, only we do not call it so--I speak of the life... makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow from a chemical reaction? I think they were here already, I think the rocks and the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies have their various consciousness, all things are conscious; but the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass to concentrate the heat and make it catch fire...but those and all things have their own awareness, as the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all, like the cells of a man's body making one being, they make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,or drown in despair when his days darken." - Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
"Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Two paths lie before us. One leads to death, the other to life. If we choose the first path--if we numbly refuse to acknowledge the nearness of extinction, all the while increasing our preparations to bring it about--then we in effect become the allies of death….On the other hand, if we reject our doom, and bend our efforts toward survival--if we arouse ourselves to the peril and act to forestall it, making ourselves the allies of life--hen the anesthetic fog will lift…and we will take full and clear possession of life again…and rise up to cleanse the earth of nuclear weapons." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
"Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.z1b3Ae0CfN" - Joseph Heller
"Man must be a co-worker with God in making this earth a garden." - Joseph H. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz
"Civilized man has been more ruthlessly wasteful and grasping in his attitude toward the natural world than has served even his most material best interests. Possibly - as some hope - a mere enlightened selfishness will save it in time. Even if we should learn just in the nick of time not to destroy what is necessary for our own preservation, the mere determination to survive is not sufficient to save very much of the variety and beauty of the natural world. They can e preserved only if man feels the necessity of sharing the earth with at least some of his fellow creatures to be a privilege rather han an irritation. And he is not likely to feel that without something more than intellectual curiosity - that something more you may call love, fellow-feeling, or reverence for life. Without reverence or love the increasing awareness of what the science of ecology teaches us can come to be no more than a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing toward God we are made worthy. These are three means, as I understand, whereby that all souls come to heaven: that is to say, that have been sinners in earth and shall be saved: for by these three medicines it behoveth that every soul be healed." - Julian of Norwich NULL
"The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart." - Julien Green
"'What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth — or in heaven — do I mean by "integral"? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: "comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness." Short definition, tall order." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"Put bluntly, there is an archaic God, a magic God, a mythic God, a mental God, and an integral God. Which God do you believe in? An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above. Which of those Gods is the most important? According to an integral view, all of them, because each "higher" stage actually builds upon and includes the lower, so the lower stages are more fundamental and the higher stages are more significant, but leave out any one of them and you're in trouble. You are, that is, less than integral, less than comprehensive, less than inclusive in your understanding of God." - Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
"The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution. " - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather." - Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
"The destiny of Man is not limited to his existence on earth and he must never forget that fact. He exists less by the actions performed during his life than by the wake he leaves behind him like a shooting star." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
"Death, with a peace beyond dreaming,its children of earth doth endow; life is the time we can help them,so give them the flowers now!" - Leigh Mitchell Hodges
"The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"The earth is not in the centre of the Sun's orbit nor at the centre of the universe, but in the centre of its companion elements, and united with them. And any one standing on the moon, when it and the sun are both beneath us, would see this our earth and the element of water upon it just as we see the moon, and the earth would light it as it lights us." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished." - Lewis Thomas
"The uniformity of earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. " - Lewis Thomas
"Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul. " - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"I can't believe that God put us on this earth to be ordinary." - Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
"After death, life reappears in a different form and with different laws. It is inscribed in the laws of the permanence of life on the surface of the earth and everything that has been a plant and an animal will be destroyed and transformed into a gaseous, volatile and mineral substance. " - Louis Pasteur
"The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
"I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made." - Lu Xun, or Lu Hsün, pen name of Zhou Shuren
"Even so, when the framework of the world is dissolved, and the final hour, closing so many ages, reverts to pristine chaos, then the fiery stars will drop into the sea, and the earth will shake off the ocean...and the whole distracted firmament will overthrow its laws." - Lucan, full name Marcus Annaeus Lucanus NULL
"What once sprung from the earth sinks back into the earth." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
"Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
"Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
"Life on earth is brief. But note, dear mystic, brief only in time, for in its value it is as infinite as God." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
"He loved the earth and all things of the earth.. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard, he knew the lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to the lack of respect for humans too." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
"The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin