This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn't it? reunited with fresh hopes, we'd share a few deliriously happy days together. Or sometimes even weeks." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"If I were going to have such a short visit on earth, I had to do everything possible to experience it now." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Kalos Kai Agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Value is given to our little limited lives. Our days are reckoned as movements in the sweep of the centuries. Their faint note belongs to the ocean of song to which worlds and ages have contributed. Our doings help and hinder, spread or retard, the pulsations of the universe's heart. We are a part of the eternities and have a part to play in their orchestrated symphonic movement." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind." - Emma Goldman
"We rarely write the names of the Earth, the Sun and the Moon – each unique and surely of crucial significance – as here, honoring them with a capital letter. This may seem trivial, but our dislocation from nature is one of the most serious schisms in our dismembered psyche and probably the most urgent relationship we need to heal." - Ervin László
"Be happy in anticipation of what's coming." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"If you're not thinking about a negative thought, your vibration is going to raise to its natural positive place." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"The beast, like all of you, chooses freedom first. And if ever the physical condition becomes less than joyful, the beast, if left to himself, will re-emerge into Non-Physical." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"The only way that you can ever know if something is of value to you is by the way it feels as you are receiving it." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"Have you ever noticed that Jesus is never recorded as taking a holiday? He retired for the purposes of his mission, not from it. He was never destroyed by his work; he was always on top of it. He moved among people as the master of every situation. He was busier than anyone; the multitudes were always at him, yet he had time, for everything and everyone. He was never hurried, or harassed, or too busy. He had complete supremacy over time; he never let it dictate to him. He talked of my time; my hour. He knew exactly when the moment had come for doing something and when it had not." - Evelyn Underhill
"I am wholly devoid of public spirit or moral purpose. This is incomprehensible to many men, and they seek to remedy the defect by crediting me with purposes of their own. The only thing I respect is intellectual honesty, of which, of course, intellectual courage is a necessary part. A Socialist who goes to jail for his opinions seems to me a much finer man than the judge who sends him there, though I disagree with all the ideas of the Socialist and agree with some of those of the judge. But though he is fine, the Socialist is nevertheless foolish, for he suffers for what is untrue. If I knew what was true, I'd probably be willing to sweat and strive for it, and maybe even to die for it to the tune of bugle-blasts. But so far I have not found it." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air?that progress made under the shadow of the policeman?s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave? In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen? I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The thief's wife does not always laugh." - Italian Proverbs
"Who lives by hope will die of hunger." - Italian Proverbs
"Clothes are of but little loss, if you escape from drowning." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn?t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. That there?s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo? and it?s worth fighting for." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger; someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them..." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien