This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A man can know nothing of mankind without knowing something of himself. Self-knowledge is the property of that man whose passions have their full play, but who ponders over their results." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Life is so mysterious. People are in misery, and they don’t know how to get out, get help or free themselves. Life is total freedom, but we’re trapped in our own civilization, culture, religion, teachings. We’re equipped with fear, ignorance, unhappiness. Desire is the big evil, the big temptation. Many people carry on in life without knowing this. We do so much for our bodies but not for our souls. Pay attention to yourself, monitor your thinking and capture the villains within. Know what it is in you that would make people suffer more, make people suffer less. Know this and you know how to use your thinking and abilities to bring peace. Certain people have certain duties, a talent. The meaning of life is to see this mission, fulfill it and make the maximum use of your life and your benefit and mankind’s." - Bernie S. Siegel
"No weapons hurt the soul; no fire burns it; no waters moisten it; no wind dries it up. It is imperishable, perpetual, immovable, eternal. Therefore, knowing it thus, you should not grieve." - Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
"If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is. That being so, who would dare to attempt to answer the question? Certainly not we, who bear no relation to him." - Blaise Pascal
"To eternity itself there is no other handle than the present moment. Let any man examine his thoughts and he will find them ever occupied with the past or the future. We scarcely think at all of the present; or if we do, it is only to borrow the light which it gives for regulating the future. The present is never our object; the past and the present we use as means; the future only is our end. Thus, we never live, we only hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so. All the miseries of mankind come from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone." - Blaise Pascal
"To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. The greatness of the human soul is shown by knowing how to keep within proper bounds. So far from greatness consisting in going beyond its limits, it really consists in keeping within it." - Blaise Pascal
"We desire the truth, but find within ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness, but find mainly misery. We are incapable of suppressing the desire for truth and happiness, and yet are incapable of knowing truth and happiness. These frustrated desires remind us how far we have fallen from our true state." - Blaise Pascal
"All man's troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in a room." - Blaise Pascal
"This body is mortal, forever in the clutch of death. But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form. This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body, is subject to pleasure and pain; and so long as this association continues, no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures. But when the association comes to an end, there is an end also of pain and pleasure. Rising above physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind., knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free." - Chandogya Upanishad
"Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
"The nature or very essence of phenomena, whether vital or mineral, will always remain unknown... Absolute knowledge could, therefore, leave nothing outside itself; and only on condition of knowing everything could man be granted its attainment. Man behaves as if he were destined to reach this absolute knowledge; and the incessant why which he puts to nature proves it. Indeed, this hope, constantly disappointed, constantly reborn, sustains and always will sustain successive generation sin the passionate search for truth." - Claude Bernard
"Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know human beings." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To be fond of learning is to draw close to wisdom. To practice with vigor is to draw close to benevolence. To know the seen of shame is to draw close to courage. He who knows these three things knows how to cultivate his own character. Knowing how to cultivate his own character, he knows how to govern other men. Knowing how to govern other men, he knows how to govern the world, it states, and its families." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Nothing is real, or if it is, we don’t know it. We have no way of knowing the truth. Truth is at the bottom of an abyss." - Democritus NULL
"Unhappiness is in not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it." - Don Herold
"Our power comes from knowing that everything is all right and everyone is unfolding exactly as they are supposed to." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"The key to patience is knowing that everything is going to be fine, developing the faith that there is a plan… The first step to becoming more patient is giving up the need to fix or change things." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that deep patience will bring deep peace and healing." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who insists on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
"Success often comes from not knowing your limitations." - Frank Tyger
"Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the reunification of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, that is, ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent persona and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a love about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion." - George Santayana
"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness." - George Santayana
"It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Men are called fools in one age for not knowing what they were called fools for averring in the age before." - Henry Ward Beecher
"So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Hope is a word like a snowdrift - This is the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness - So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry." - Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
"We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing." - Jane Austen
"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given for you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything . Live the questions now and perhaps without knowing it you will live along some day into the answers." - Jeremy Rifkin
"The world is a single whole. Everything is linked with everything else. The world 'sounds'. It is a 'chord'. The imagination and freedom necessary for feeling, experiencing, and living through - rather than merely knowing - these are more likely to be associated with an ana-logical process of perception than with logical thinking. Logic aims at security. The ana-logician has the courage to embark on risk and adventure. Logic is goal-oriented and passes judgment. Analogy ponders and establishes relationships. The logician sees. The ana-logician listens... The eye glimpses surfaces and is attached to them, always remaining superficial (on the surface). The ear penetrates deep into the realms it investigates through hearing." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt
"'You put stock in winning wars, 'the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. 'The real trick lies in losing wars, and in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.'" - Joseph Heller
"The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach." - Lin Yutang
"Nine-tenths of the serious controversies which arise in life result from misunderstandings; result from one man not knowing the facts which to the other man seem important, or otherwise failing to appreciate his point of view." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"The world faces us with the impossibility of knowing it directly ... It is a world whose nature cannot be comprehended by our human powers of mental conception." - Max Planck, fully Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck
"There's nothing more tragic than a young cynic because then the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same - one in seeing, one is knowing, and one in loving." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"Nothing hinders the soul from knowing God so much as time and place. Time and place are fractions, God is an integer." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one’s life without knowing where it really leads – such is the behavior of the multitude." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads - such is the behavior of the multitude." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"Government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly it's just to prevent the population from knowing what's going on. I mean, a lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there's virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not." - Oprah Winfrey, born Oprah Gail Winfrey
"The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." - Plato NULL