This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own." - Robert Collier
"Now, believe me, God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best." - Robert Collyer
"As the servant longs for the master’s hand, so craves the cantor’s soul, O extend Thy mercy upon him, rend his debt-recording scroll. "Unto Me return, then will I to thee"—were this Thy word unsaid, Like a captain humbled while at his post he now would droop his head. To Thy servant, Lord, Thou wilt surely ope the penitential way, May his fruit be sweet as he stands to lead our prayers to Thee to-day. As we watch our brother, behold, we note the grey that streaks his hair, And his heart a-swim in a sense of sin as praying stands he there. Let the fervent breath of Thy suppliant be witness for his heart, Let him but return to Thee this once, he never will depart." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Goethe's thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through." - Rudolf Steiner, fully Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
"He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Enthusiasm ... the sustaining power of all great action." - Samuel Smiles
"A state too expensive in itself, or by virtue of its dependencies, ultimately falls into decay; its free government is transformed into a tyranny; it disregards the principles which it should preserve, and finally degenerates into despotism. The distinguishing characteristic of small republics is stability: the character of large republics is mutability." - Simón Bolívar, fully Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco
"Heaven forbids that man should know what change tomorrow's fate may bring." - Statius, fully Publius Papinius Statius NULL
"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
"No man is free who is not master of himself. [Epictetus]" - Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
"What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance." - Theodore Roethke
"A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"The seductive appeal of objective reality depends on a mistake. It is not the given. Sometimes ... the truth is not found by traveling as far away from one's personal perspective as possible." - Thomas Nagel
"It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engages." - Thomas Paine
"Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Am I a space man? Do I belong to a new race on Earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with Earth women? Are my children offspring of the first interplanetary race? Has the melting-pot of interplanetary society already been created on our planet, as the melting-pot of all Earth nations was established in the U.S. A. 190 years ago?" - Wilhelm Reich
"O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish; of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d; of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; the question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"I just don't see anything available that gives any reasonable hope of delivering such a good year and I have no desire to grope around, hoping to 'get lucky' with other people's money. I am not attuned to this market environment, and I don't want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don't understand just so I can go out a hero." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you are young. It is almost like looking down from heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half-awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you just don't know it." - Wendell Berry
"As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"For me, the work is an absolute necessity. I cannot put it off; I don't care for anything else; that is to say, the pleasure in something else ceases at once, and I become melancholy when I cannot go on with my work. I feel then as the weaver does when he sees that his threads have got tangled, the pattern he had on the loom has gone to the deuce, and his exertion and deliberation are lost." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"By Thy perfect Intelligence, O Mazda Thou didst first create us having bodies and spiritual consciences, and by Thy Thought gave ourselves the power of thought, word, and deed. Thus leaving us free to choose our faith at our own will." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"As yet, it must be owned, this daring expectation is but feebly reflected in our books. In looking over any collection of American poetry, for instance, one is struck with the fact that it is not so much faulty as inadequate. Emerson set free the poetic intuition of America, Hawthorne its imagination. Both looked into the realm of passion, Emerson with distrust, Hawthorne with eager interest; but neither thrilled with its spell, and the American poet of passion is yet to come. How tame and manageable are wont to be the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions! There is no baptism of fire; no heat that breeds excess. Yet it is not life that is grown dull, surely; there are as many secrets in every heart, as many skeletons in every closet, as in any elder period of the world’s career. It is the interpreters of life who are found wanting, and that not on this soil alone, but throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not just to say, as someone has said, that our language has not in this generation produced a love-song, for it has produced Browning; but was it in England or in Italy that he learned to sound the depths of all human emotion?" - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly." - William James
"In business for yourself, not by yourself." - William James
"The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck." - William James
"I have the utmost respect for them. It was formed at the time of great violence and danger, particularly for African-American lawyers." - William Morris
"To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"All hope is prayer; who calls it hope no more, sends prayer footsore forth over weary wastes, while he who calls it prayer, gives wings to hope." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion." - Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
"As to deliberate mortifications -- I take it you do feel satisfied that you accept fully those God sends. That being so, you might perhaps do one or two little things, as acts of love, and also as discipline. I suggest by preference the mortification of the tongue -- as being very tiresome and quite harmless to the health. Careful guard on all amusing criticisms of others, on all complaints however casual or trivial." - Evelyn Underhill
"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
"The moral ideal would embrace the whole of life. In its sight nothing is petty or indifferent. It touches the veriest trifles and turns them into shining gold. We are royal by virtue of it, and like the kings in the fairy tale, we may never lay aside our crowns." - Felix Adler