This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation is ever dangerous." - Thomas Jefferson
"We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that." - Thomas Jefferson
"A Song : The Sparkling Eye - The sparkling eye, the mantling cheek, The polished front, the snowy neck, How seldom we behold in one! Glossy locks, and brow serene, Venus' smiles, Diana's mien, All meet in you, and you alone. Beauty, like other powers, maintains Her empire, and by union reigns; Each single feature faintly warms: But where at once we view displayed Unblemished grace, the perfect maid Our eyes, our ears, our heart alarms. So when on earth the god of day Obliquely sheds his tempered ray, Through convex orbs the beams transmit, The beams that gently warmed before, Collected, gently warm no more, But glow with more prevailing heat. " - William Cowper
"And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair." - William Collins
"When Gott made the womens, he was sorry afterwards for the poor mens--and he made tobaccos to comfort them." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Jim, she said earnestly, if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Unless we proceed cautiously, there might well arise a few generations of mystics who conceive of the orgone metaphysically, divorced from non-living nature and who do not comprehend it from the standpoint of natural science. And it seems to me that we have more than enough mysticism as it is." - Wilhelm Reich
"The laws are at present, both in form and essence, the greatest curse that society labours under." - Walter Savage Landor
"The market outperformed business for a very long time, and that phenomenon had to end," - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"All emanates from Source!...You're not this body and its accomplishments. You are the observer. Notice it all; and be grateful for the abilities you've been given, the motivation to achieve, and the stuff you've accumulated. But give all the credit to the power of intention, which brought you into existence." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Choose to be in close proximity to people who are empowering, who appeal to your sense of connection to intention, who see the greatness in you, who feel connected to God, who live a life that gives evidence that Spirit has found celebration through them." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"A wise wolf hides his fangs." - Welsh Proverbs
"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry
"When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding then to attend to him); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But, no. Nothing would make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Now forsake everything and now Mollero moorings. Now deliver the desire restrained and repressed because finlamente you can spend, you can consume. Galopperemo together over the desert hills where the swallow dips her wings in dark pools and columns rise up whole. Wave slamming on the beach, wave casting its white foam to the most remote corners of the earth, I throw my violets, my offering to Percival." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for." - Vicki Robin
"It is with sorrows, as with countries, each man has his own." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"But is laughter a synonym for joy? To give one's entire talent to a production is the greatest triumph that anyone can achieve." - Victor Hugo
"Every man should first desire to acquire maximum knowledge, to engage himself in the noblest of deeds, earn social respect, success, fame and prosperity, authority and then act accordingly in order to realize them." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"You are like the rocks on the seashore that unflinchingly face the beating of the waves. The rock does not move; the wave will not stop. This predicament should end. Awake and avail yourselves of this unique chance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"We promise to provide much give few." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"All afflictions are based on selfishness. That's why we have so much anger and so many afflictions." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Life means that I can live to see tomorrow." - Tokugawa Ieyasu
"Ah, she doth teach the torches to burn bright, it seems she hangs against the cheek of night like a rich jewel from an Ethiope's ear, beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear." - William Shakespeare
"And, seeing ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven, unless you be possessed with devilish spirits, You cannot but forbear to murder me." - William Shakespeare
"Come, gentle night, — come, loving black brow'd night, give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of Heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun. Romeo and Juliet, Act iii, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare
"The Fountaine of parents duties is Love... Great reason there is why this affection should be fast fixed towards their children. F or great is that paine, cost, and care, which parents must undergoe for their children. But if love be in them, no paine, paines, cost or care will seeme too much." - William Gouge
"It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Raillery is more insupportable than wrong; because we have a right to resent injuries, but are ridiculous in being angry at a jest." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The greatest miracle of love is the cure of coquetry." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Were we faultless, we would not derive such satisfaction from remarking the faults of others." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths; Win us with honest trifles, to betray us In deepest consequence." - William Shakespeare
"We are not told of things that happened to specific people exactly as they happened; but the beginning is when there are good things and bad things, things that happen in this life which one never tires of seeing and hearing about, things which one cannot bear not to tell of and must pass on for all generations. If the storyteller wishes to speak well, then he chooses the good things; and if he wishes to hold the reader’s attention he chooses bad things, extraordinarily bad things. Good things and bad things alike, they are things of this world and no other. Writers in other countries approach the matter differently. Old stories in our own are different from new. There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth. To the ignorant they may seem to operate at cross purposes. The Greater Vehicle is full of them, but the general burden is always the same. The difference between enlightenment and confusion is of about the same order as the difference between the good and the bad in a romance. If one takes the generous view, then nothing is empty and useless." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
"Providence has clearly ordained that the only path fit and salutary for man on earth is the path of persevering fortitude--the unremitting struggle of deliberate self-preparation and humble but active reliance on divine aid." - Elias L. Magoon
"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, the bird of dawning singeth all night long, and then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, the nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm. So hallowed and so gracious is that time." - William Shakespeare
"Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time." - William Shakespeare
"I am no lover of pompous title, but only desire that my name may be recorded in a line or two, which shall briefly express my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"A fish always rots from the head down." - English Proverbs
"He that does you an ill turn will never forgive you." - English Proverbs
"It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones. You kept from thinking and it was all marvelous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by someone who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"What is at stake is not economics, but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics and the standards of living can just as well be looked after by a capitalist system, moderated by a bit of planning and redistributive taxation. But culture and, generally, the quality of life, can now only be debased by such a system." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me." - Eugenio Montale
"Today all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable. The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of a military-industrial-labor complex." - Hannah Arendt