This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily." - Wilhelm Reich
"Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values." - Wilhelm Röepke
"A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Our sympathies are with the families during this difficult time. In regard to the reports, we believe they speak for themselves." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is understandable that I should have sentimental attachment for the little personage who played so big a part in the course of Disney Productions and has been so happily accepted as an amusing friend wherever films are shown around the world. He still speaks for me and I still speak for him." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature — a good bit, of course, but a bit only — in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence." - Walter Bagehot
"When great questions end, little parties begin." - Walter Bagehot
"As the vine which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs; so it is beautifully ordered by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart." - Washington Irving
"Such was the Arab of the desert, the dweller in tents, in whom was fulfilled the prophetic destiny of his ancestor Ishmael. He will be a wild man ; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him. Nature had fitted him for his destiny. His form was light and meager, but sinewy and active, and capable of sustaining great fatigue and hardship. He was temper- ate and even abstemious, requiring but little food, and that of the simplest kind. His mind, like his body, was light and agile. He eminently possessed the intellectual attributes of the Semitic race, penetrating sagacity, subtle wit, a ready conception, and a brilliant imagination. His sensibilities were quick and acute, though not lasting; proud and daring spirit was stamped on his sallow visage and flashed from his dark and kindling eye. He was easily aroused by the appeals of eloquence, and charmed by the graces of poetry. Speaking a language copious in the extreme, the words of which have been com- pared to gems and flowers, he was naturally an orator; but he delighted in proverbs and apothegms, rather than in sustained flights of declamation, and was prone to con-vey his ideas in the oriental style, by apologue and parable." - Washington Irving
"Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time." - Wendell Berry
"As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased with the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them." - Wendell Berry
"In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree." - Wendell Berry
"In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known." - Wendell Berry
"No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences." - Wendell Berry
"To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings. We must suspect that any statistical justification of ugliness and violence is a revelation of stupidity." - Wendell Berry
"Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss." - Wendell Berry
"All women are crazy, it’s only a question of degree." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy
"What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious." - Walker Percy
"To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, as if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, to hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, as if the paradise of meaning ceased to be paradise, it is this to be destitute." - Wallace Stevens
"To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilization of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating, or conditional allies)—is that not ridiculous in the extreme?”" - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"My God died young. Theolatry I found degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The day, like the previous days, dragged sluggishly by in a kind of insipid idleness, devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Orderliness - One doesn't have to begin to learn how to be silent, but one has to begin with learning to function in an orderly, clear, unconfused way. Every cerebral movement has to be clear, precise and accurate. Accuracy, precision, is the breath of orderliness. So I learn to be precise and accurate. And in learning to be precise and accurate I learn to be totally present with everything that I do." - Vimala Thakar
"People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"The quality of each man's life is the full measure of that man's personal commitment to excellence and to victory." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves." - Virginia Satir
"It's sad that children cannot know their parents when they were younger; when they were loving, courting, and being nice to one another. By the time children are old enough to observe, the romance has all too often faded or gone underground." - Virginia Satir
"Rearing a family is probably the most difficult job in the world. It resembles two business firms merging their respective resources to make a single product. All the potential headaches of that operation are present when an adult male and an adult female join to steer a child from infancy to adulthood." - Virginia Satir
"So much is asked of parents, and so little is given." - Virginia Satir
"Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth, one subterfuge was tried after another … sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"A war between Europeans is a civil war." - Victor Hugo
"A woman should perform the duties of a wife without any complain, give birth to good children and bring them up as ideal citizens." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"About thee (my husband) I have placed the overpowering (plant), upon thee placed the very overpowering one. May thy mind run after me as a calf after the cow, as water along its course." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Honor and dishonor are the same to me; I have placed my forehead upon the Guru's Feet. Wealth does not excite me, and misfortune does not disturb me; I have embraced love for my Lord and Master." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The hypocritical and the greedy are struck down; the Messenger of Death punishes them with his club. O camel-like mind, you are my breath of life; rid yourself of the pollution of hypocrisy and doubt." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J.A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, am now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Los Lobos river, and sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and 'Bunny' is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to End Poverty in California I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"If you can see a thing whole, he said, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon-I don't want it! But I am not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity. It's nothing to do with eternity, said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. All you have to do to see life as a whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining? Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy! Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light-Don't be propertarian, Takver muttered. Dear heart, don't cry. I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears. I'm cold. The moonlight's cold. Lie down. A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms. I'm afraid, Takver, he whispered." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"The most dangerous walls are not political or military boundaries but the walls that mutually divide individual people and that divide our own souls. My presidential agenda would be to bring spirituality, moral responsibility and humility into politics and, in that respect, to make clear that there is something higher above us. [Paraphrase]" - Václav Havel