This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"'Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both." - Robert Burton
"If the wine drinker has a deep gentleness in him, he will show that when drunk. But if he has hidden anger and arrogance, those appear." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Infinite mercy flows continually But you're asleep and can't see it." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Once you conquer your selfish self, all your darkness will change to light." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"Listen, I entreat you, all that are careful for this life, and procure books that will be medicines for the soul… get at least the New Testament, the Apostolic Epistles, the Acts, the Gospels, for your constant teachers. If grief befalls you, dive into them as into a chest of medicines; take from there comfort for your trouble, be it loss, or death, or bereavement of relations; or rather do not merely dive into them but take them wholly to yourself, keeping them in your mind." - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
"There cannot be a supreme evil, because... although evil always lessens good, yet it never wholly consumes it; and thus, since good always remains, nothing can be wholly and perfectly bad." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought." - Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL
"I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in." - Salman Rushdie, fully Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
"A man guilty of poverty easily believes himself suspected." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"All fear is painful, and when it conduces not to safety, is painful without use. - Every consideration, therefore, by which groundless terrors may be removed, adds something to human happiness." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Pride is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates to the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science, the vicissitudes of learning and ignorance, the extinction and resuscitation of arts, and the revolutions of the intellectual world. - If accounts of battles and invasions are peculiarly the business of princes, the useful and elegant arts are not to be neglected, and those who have kingdoms to govern have understandings to cultivate." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Were a man not to marry a second time, it might be concluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a second wife, he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"One extreme produces another." - Samuel Richardson
"Death’s but one more to-morrow." - Silas Weir Mitchell
"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"He cannot have God for his father who has not the church for his mother." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
"The world is going mad in mutual bloodshed. And murder, which is considered a crime when people commit it singly, is transformed into a virtue when they do it en masse. The offenders acquire impunity by increasing their ravaging." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
"[A doctor] preserves, if it already exists, the health and good habit of the flesh, or if absent, recalls it… But the scope of our art is to provide the soul with wings, to rescue it from the world and give it to God." - Gregory Nazianzen, aka Saint Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory the Theologian
"Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme. de Renal." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
"I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
"O my boy! he who doeth good shall meet with good; and he who doeth evil shall meet with evil, for the Lord requiteth a man according to the measure of his work. O my boy! what shall I say more to thee than these sayings? for the Lord knoweth what is hidden, and is acquainted with the mysteries and the secrets. And He will requite thee and will judge, betwixt me and thee, and will recompense thee according to thy desert." - Ahikar or Ahiqar NULL
"Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck. An epidemic in indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!" - Thomas Carlyle
"Every man calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, good; and that evil which displeaseth him." - Thomas Hobbes
"The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind." - Thomas Hobbes
"If treasury bills are emitted on a tax appropriated for their redemption in fifteen years, and (to insure preference in the first moments of competition) bearing an interest of six per cent, there is no one who would not take them in preference to the bank paper now afloat, on a principle of patriotism as well as interest; and they would be withdrawn from circulation into private hoards to a considerable amount. Their credit once established, others might be emitted, bottomed also on a tax, but not bearing interest; and if ever their credit faltered, open public loans, on which these bills alone should be received as specie. These, operating as a sinking fund, would reduce the quantity in circulation, so as to maintain that in an equilibrium with specie. It is not easy to estimate the obstacles which, in the beginning, we should encounter in ousting the banks from their possession of the circulation; but a steady and judicious alternation of emissions and loans would reduce them in time." - Thomas Jefferson
"I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. ‘Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies.’ ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.’ ‘Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leapèd and shoutèd and laugh’d And all the hills echoèd." - William Blake
"Once a dream did weave a shade O’er my Angel-guarded bed, That an emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay. Troubled, ’wilder’d, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangled spray, All heart-broke I heard her say: ‘O, my children! do they cry? Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see: Now return and weep for me.’ Pitying, I dropp’d a tear; But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied: ‘What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night? ‘I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle’s hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home.’" - William Blake
"On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival." - Willard Gaylen
"For prayer is nothing less than an ascent to the heart of God and its withdrawal from all Earthly thoughts. Therefore prayer is compared with fire, which in its own nature always leaves the Earth and Leaps into the air." - Walter Hilton
"I hate women because they always know where things are." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The wise man does not grow old, but ripens." - Victor Hugo
"Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign." - Victor Hugo
"The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task. . . . He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"In his hearth and home, in his palace, upon his soft and comfortable bed, day and night, the flower-girls scatter flower petals; but without the Lord's Name, the body is miserable. Horses, elephants, lances, marching bands, armies, standard bearers, royal attendants and ostentatious displays - without the Lord of the Universe, these undertakings are all useless." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"You people are unconscious; you should be afraid of sin." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"The maxims of men betray their hearts." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL