This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Let us appeal to ourselves, whether we are not more unwilling to secret, closet, hearty duty to God, than to join with others in some external service; as if those inward services were a going to the rack, and rather our penance than privilege. How much service hath God in the world from the same principle that vagrants perform their task in Bridewell! How glad are many of evasions to back them in the neglect of the commands of God, of corrupt reasonings from the flesh to waylay an act of obedience, and a multitude of excuses to blunt the edge of the precept!" - Stephen Charnock
"Many times we serve God as languishingly as if we were afraid he should accept us, and pray as coldly as if we were unwilling he should hear us, and take away that lust by which we are governed, and which conscience forces us to pray against; as if we were afraid God should set up his own throne and government in our hearts. How fleeting are we in divine meditation, how sleepy in spiritual exercises! but in other exercises active. The soul doth not awaken itself, and excite those animal and vital spirits, which it will in bodily recreations and sports; much less the powers of the soul: whereby it is evident we prefer the latter before any service to God." - Stephen Charnock
"The Devil accuses us when we fall, but he has not so much on his side as we have." - Stephen Charnock
"Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." - Stephen Hawking
"Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it." - Stephen Hawking
"Courage is often nothing more than reversed weakness." - Stefan Zweig
"Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can." - Stefan Zweig
"With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophy ... with bellicose weapons and armor." - Stefan Zweig
"It is the mark of a small mind to attack others when they fail in what he undertook, he who carries on itself a spirit[Epictetus]ual work takes them to himself: he that complete this work nor does it take to oneself or to others ." - Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
"When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, “What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious?” [Epictetus]" - Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
"Philanthropic colonization is a failure. National colonization will succeed." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
"There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable. Though the usual presumption is that this is more true of consumer goods than industrial goods and services, the opposite is the actual case." - Theodore Levitt
"Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainly that class's own worst enemy." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"I abhor unjust war. I abhor injustice and bullying by the strong at the expense of the weak, whether among nations or individuals. I abhor violence and bloodshed. I believe that war should never be resorted to when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid it. I respect all men and women who from high motives and with sanity and self-respect do all they can to avert war. I advocate preparation for war in order to avert war; and I should never advocate war unless it were the only alternative to dishonor." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance. Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, appeal especially to hatred and fear. These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment. In facing new industrial conditions, the whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint. [...] All this is true; and yet it is also true that there are real and grave evils, one of the chief being over-capitalization because of its many baleful consequences; and a resolute and practical effort must be made to correct these evils. There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This [...] is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
"Be not anxious about thy provision for old age, for by all appearance thou wilt never see it. It is more than probable thou wilt be sooner at thy journey's end. The body is weak; it is even stepping down to salute corruption as its mother, ere it has well entered the hall of the world: thy tabernacle pins seem to be drawing out by little and little already. Courage then, O my soul; ere long the devil, and the world, and the flesh shall be bruised underthy feet; and thou shalt be received into eternal mansions. But though the Lord should lengthen out thy days to old age, he that brought thee into life will not forsake thee then either. If he give thee life, he will give thee meat. Keep a loose hold of the world then; contemn it if thou wouldst be a fisher of men.." - Thomas Boston
"A dandy is a clothes-wearing man,-a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes.-Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person, and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object-the wearing of clothes wisely and well; so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress." - Thomas Carlyle
"France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams." - Thomas Carlyle
"No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects." - Thomas Carlyle
"The chambers of the East are opened in every land, and the sun come forth to sow the earth with orient pearl. Night, the ancient mother, follows him with her diadem of stars. * * * Bright creatures! how they gleam like spirits through the shadows of innumerable eyes from their thrones in the boundless depths of heaven." - Thomas Carlyle
"These limbs,--whence had we them, this stormy force; this life-blood, with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow--a shadow system gathered round our me; wherein through some moments or years, the divine essence is to be revealed in the flesh." - Thomas Carlyle
"Trust not the heart of that man for whom old clothes are not venerable." - Thomas Carlyle
"When words leave off, music begins." - Thomas Carlyle
"Wondrous indeed is the virtue of a true Book." - Thomas Carlyle
"There is a set of people whom I cannot bear—the pinks of fashionable propriety,—whose every word is precise, and whose every movement is unexceptionable, but who, though versed in all the categories of polite behaviour, have not a particle of soul or cordiality about them. We allow that their manners may be abundantly correct. There may be eloquence in every gesture, and gracefulness in every position; not a smile out of place, and not a step that would not bear the measurement of the severest scrutiny. This is all very fine: but what I want is the heart and gaiety of social intercourse; the frankness that spreads ease and animation around it; the eye that speaks affability to all, that chases timidity from every bosom, and tells every man in the company to be confident and happy. This is what I conceive to be the virtue of the text, and not the sickening formality of those who walk by rule, and would reduce the whole of human life to a wire-bound system of misery and constraint." - Thomas Chalmers
"The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes." - Thomas Hobbes
"Why any man should take the law of his country rather than his own Inspiration, for the rule of his action." - Thomas Hobbes
"Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, that we too may leave behind us —Letters that we ought to burn." - Thomas Hood
"One's own—what a charm there is in the words! how long it takes boy and man to find out their worth! how fast most of us hold on to them! faster and more jealously, the nearer we are to the general home into which we can take nothing, but must go naked as we came into the world. When shall we learn that he who multiplieth possessions, multiplieth troubles, and that the one single use of things which we call our own, is that they may be his who hath need of them?" - Thomas Hughes
"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." - Thomas Jefferson
"By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves." - Thomas Jefferson
"I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind." - Thomas Jefferson
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." - Thomas Jefferson
"I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial." - Thomas Jefferson
"Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy." - Thomas Jefferson
"Let nothing be spared of either reason or passion to preserve the public confidence entire as the only rock of our safety." - Thomas Jefferson
"No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly. That will always appear to be his native language which was most familiar to him in his youth." - Thomas Jefferson
"Resolved... that it would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights; that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go…In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus." - Thomas Jefferson
"The foundation on which all [our State constitutions] are built is the natural equality of man, the denial of every pre-eminence but that annexed to legal office and particularly the denial of apre-eminence by birth." - Thomas Jefferson
"The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." - Thomas Jefferson
"The most sacred of the duties of a government is to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens." - Thomas Jefferson
"To draw around the whole nation the strength of the General Government, as a barrier against foreign foes, to equalize and moderate the public contributions, that while the requisite services are invited by due renumeration, nothing beyond this may exist to attract the attention of our citizens from the pursuits of useful industry, nor unjustly to burthen those who continue in those pursuitsthese are functions of the General Government on which you have a right to call." - Thomas Jefferson
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." - Thomas Jefferson
"When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson