This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It requires greater virtues to support good than bad fortune." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"These, characteristically different from one another and variously modified by the gunas, present to the intellect (buddhi) the whole purpose of the Self (purusha), illumining it like a lamp." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"We should practice wisdom during our daily work, during interacting with annoying people, performing tiresome duties, looking after parents or sick relatives, ... if someone neglects these duties, but excels in his study of Zen, he is vastly off the mark." - Hakuin, fully Hakuin Akaku NULL
"We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect." - Egon Friedell, born Egon Friedmann
"A man with two ears can be supported by two words." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Isn't there a picture that belongs in the original frame? Life [one suspects she means spiritual life] cannot die. You can explode its dynamism [the physical body] but you cannot dissipate its energy. If you suffer where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatize and live again." - Eileen Garrett
"When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak." - Elias Canetti
"Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite..." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and THIS makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captain of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors... In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I want to have a lasting experience of God', I told him. 'Sometimes I feel like I understand the divinity of this world, but then I lose it because I get distracted by my petty desires and fears. I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"If you do not know where you are or what clan you are, how will you find the balance?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freezer door, saying, 'Amazing! Perfect ice cubes again.' That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about. I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes. But a good quesiton to ask yourself is this: If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not? What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?" - Elizabeth Lesser
"I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become THE imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test." - Ellen Goodman
"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential." - Ellen Goodman
"I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it's so easy to be sweet to people before you love them." - Dorothy Parker
"First I was an idealist (that was early - fools are born, not made, you know); next I was a realist; now I am a pessimist, and, by Jove! if things get much worse I'll become a humorist." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one." - Ellen Key, fully Ellen Karolina Sofia Key
"Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"For that mist may break when the sun is high and this soul forget its sorrow and the rose ray of the closing day may promise a brighter ‘morrow." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." - 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
"The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice." - Emma Goldman
"There is no hope even that woman, with her right to vote, will ever purify politics." - Emma Goldman
"All enjoyment is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It is not just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a first abnegation." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skillful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"Whatever you experience in your life is really but the out-picturing of your own thoughts and beliefs. Now, you can change these thoughts and beliefs, and then the outer picture must change too. The outer picture cannot change until you change your thought. Your real heartfelt conviction is what you out-picture or demonstrate, not your mere pious opinions or formal assents. Convictions cannot be adopted arbitrarily just because you want a healing. They are built up by the thoughts you think and the feelings you entertain day after day as you go through life. So, it is your habitual mental conduct that weaves the pattern of your destiny for you, and is not this just as it should be? So no one else can keep you out of your kingdom - or put you into it either. The story of your life is really the story of the relations between yourself and God." - Emmet Fox
"When we remember that God really is omnipotent, untrammeled by what we call time or space or matter, or the vagaries of human nature, it is easy to see that there can be no limit to the power of prayer. You can pray about a problem and solve it at any stage, but of course the earlier you tackle it the easier your work will be." - Emmet Fox
"All the startup advice you read is wrong." - Evan Williams
"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong." - Eric S. Raymond
"In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century (Hermite, 1822-1901) could say without exaggeration, 'Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.' Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, 'By studying the masters, not the pupils.'" - Eric Temple Bell
"We said that the point was that even with the highest personal development and liberation, the person comes up against the real despair of the human condition. Indeed, because of that developÂment his eyes are opened to the reality of things; there is no turnÂing back to the comforts of a secure and armored life. The person is stuck with the full problem of himself, and yet he cannot rely on himself to make any sense out of it. For such a person, as Camus said, "the weight of days is dreadful." What does it mean, then, we questioned in Chapter Four, to talk fine-sounding phrases like "Being cognition," "the fully centered person," "full humanism," "the joy of peak experiences," or whatever, unless we seriously qualify such ideas with the burden and the dread that they also carry? Finally, with these questions we saw that we could call into doubt the pretensions of the whole therapeutic enterprise. What joy and comfort can it give to fully awakened people? Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life's way. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people." - Ernest Becker
"Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude - even dishonor and betrayal- to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self effacement, surrender to the others, disavowal of any personal dignity and freedom-on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces." - Ernest Becker
"If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be?" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway