This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Only the timid and the weak leave things to destiny (daivam) but the strong and the self-confident never bank on destiny or luck (bhagya)" - Valmiki NULL
"Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country." - Thomas Love Peacock
"Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"By pride one causes virtue to decline." - Tibetan Proverbs
"Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him." - William Godwin
"A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine proves contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration." - William James
"He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
"Your castle of earth and stone may be beautiful, but unless you dwell in the fortress of the unchanging, you must depart and leave it behind. So keep to the fortress of the unchanging!" - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL
"I am happy that in an age of technology there are those who are giving modern interpretation to the dream world which contains the key to the development of the evolution of the race. The dream world, and the world of deep feeling which is interpreted by symbols, relate to us the ancient races, for the dreams of ancient man and modern man are given in the same symbolic language." - Eileen Garrett
"I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have -- women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same. This country would go bankrupt in a day if the Supreme Court suddenly ordered the powers-that-be to pay back wages to children of slaves and to the women who've worked all their lives for half wages or no pay." - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"Our message is clear. We count. Children count. Everybody counts, so count everybody," - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"A few weeks ago he said to me, completely ou of nowhere, 'You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend.' Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, ' Not like Sharon.' Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn't know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who'd brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Honey, I'm Brazilian south. I can spend ten years with broken because of a woman I have not even kissed heart." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: I am your slave!) Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy again." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"What availeth wit when it fails the owner at greatest need?" - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"I did hope tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"My husband has quite simply been my strength and stay all synthesis years, and I owe him a debt Greater than he would ever claim." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshiped there for some time." - Ellen Goodman
"The world [in 2003] seemed to divide between international fundamentalists who want to keep women veiled and Internet spammers who want to unveil them on your computer screen." - Ellen Goodman
"A silence fell at the mention of Gavard. They all looked at each other cautiously. As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell. This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable. Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note." - Emile Zola
"He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes." - Emile Zola
"I would like to point out how this travesty was made possible, how it sprang out of the machinations of Major du Paty de Clam, how Generals Mercier, de Boisdeffre and Gonse became so ensnared in this falsehood that they would later feel compelled to impose it as holy and indisputable truth. Having set it all in motion merely by carelessness and lack of intelligence, they seem at worst to have given in to the religious bias of their milieu and the prejudices of their class. In the end, they allowed stupidity to prevail." - Emile Zola
"The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg." - Emile Zola
"A small leak will sink a great ship." - English Proverbs
"He had spent most of his lifetime studying the art of medicine and realized now that he would never really understand its mysteries. For medicine is an eternal quest for reasons - causes that explain effects. Science cannot comprehend a miracle." - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal
"Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"I come from a family [home] where gravy is considered a beverage." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, "No, thank you" to dessert that night. And for what?!" - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the "Titanic" who waved off the dessert cart." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life." - Ernest Becker
"Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is hapÂpening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else." - Ernest Becker
"Have no fear about doing so, for we have a “warts-and-all” religion." - Eugene Peterson
"My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general "They tell lies," he used to say with wonder, "even when they don't have to"." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
"Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"As we cleanse the inner vessel, there will have to be changes made in our own personal lives, in our families, and in the Church. The proud do not change to improve, but defend their position by rationalizing. Repentance means change, and it takes a humble person to change. But we can do it." - Ezra Taft Benson