This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavour. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire." -
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
" Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"The most common lie is the lie one tells oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery." - Granville Stanley Hall
"Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth--of carefully respecting the property of others--of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing." - Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral." - James Bovard
"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together." - Joseph Addison
"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavour. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
"All that's visible springs from causes intimate to you. While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth. If someone asks the inner meaning of this: "Inside the treasury of dharma eye a single grain of dust." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
"Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest. Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavour. It is not introspection. Do not desire to become a buddha; let sitting or lying down drop away. Be moderate in eating and drinking. Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire." - Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
"It is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."" - Lin Yutang
" I strongly recommend you to follow the analogy of the body in seeking the refreshment of the mind. Everybody knows that both man and horse are very much relieved and rested if, instead of lying down and falling asleep, or endeavouring to fall asleep, he changes the muscles he puts in operation; if instead of level ground he goes up and down hill, it is a rest both to the man walking and the horse which he rides: a different set of muscles is called into action. So I say, call into action a different class of faculties, apply your minds to other objects of wholesome food to yourselves as well as of good to others, and, depend upon it, that is the true mode of getting repose in old age. Do not overwork yourselves: do everything in moderation." - Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth - of carefully respecting the property of others - of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing. " - Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"If you experience that same longing and thirst for Union with Me as one who has been lying for days in the hot sun of the Sahara experiences for the longing for water, then you will realize Me." - Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
"To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means. Identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification; without self-purification the observance of the law of Ahimsa must remain an empty dream; God can never be realized by one who is not pure of heart. Self-purification therefore must mean purification in all the walks of life. And purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings. But the path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world's praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms. Ever since my return to India I have had experiences of the dormant passions lying hidden within me. The knowledge of them has made me feel humiliated though not defeated. The experiences and experiments have sustained me and given me great joy. But I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"At a single strain of music, the scent of a flower, or even one glimpse of a path of moonlight lying fair upon a Summer sea, the barriers crumble and fall. Through the long corridors the ghosts of the past walk unforbidden, hindered only by broken promises, dead hopes, and dream-dust." - Myrtle Reed
"They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power." - Patrick Henry
"If a philosopher says he doubts whether there is anything objectionable in the practice of lying, he is not to be heard. Perhaps he is not sincere in what he says; perhaps his understanding is debauched by wickedness; perhaps, as often happens to philosophers, he has been deluded by a fallacious argument into denying what he really knows to be the case. Anyhow, it does not lie in his mouth to say that here I am abandoning argument for abuse; there is something logically incongruous, to use Newman's phrase, if we take the word of a Professor of Lying that he does not lie. Let me emphasize that I am not saying a sane and honest man must think one should never lie; but I say that, even if he thinks lying is sometimes a necessary evil, a sane and honest man must think it an evil." - Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
"I felt that on a basis of a search for the miraculous it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"It is natural for man to relate the units of distance by which he travels to the dimensions of the globe that he inhabits. Thus, in moving about the earth, he may know by the simple denomination of distance its proportion to the whole circuit of the earth. This has the further advantage of making nautical and celestial measurements correspond. The navigator often needs to determine, one from the other, the distance he has traversed from the celestial arc lying between the zeniths at his point of departure and at his destination. It is important, therefore, that one of these magnitudes should be the expression of the other, with no difference except in the units. But to that end, the fundamental linear unit must be an aliquot part of the terrestrial meridian... Thus, the choice of the meter was reduced to that of the unity of angles. " - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace
"Do you believe me such a fool as not to prefer eating good meat, sleeping quietly with my wives and children, laughing and making merry with you, having copper and hatchets and anything else—as your friend—to flying from you as your enemy, lying cold in the woods, eating acorns and roots, and being so hunted by you meanwhile, that if but a twig break, my men will cry out, "here comes Captain Smith!" Le us be friend, then. Do not invade us thus with such an armed force. Lay aside these arms." - Powhatan, proper name was Wahunsenacawh, also spelled Wahunsonacock NULL
"He who esteems himself highly on account of his knowledge is like a corpse lying on the wayside: the traveler turns his head away in disgust, and walks quickly by." - Rabbi Akiva, fully Rebbe Akiva ben Yosef NULL
"A system of ethics may be based either on fear or on love, but not on both. When based on fear, the letter of the law, as a rule, will be executed, but not its spirit. Because of fear, men may deal honestly with one another, but they will not necessarily be honest men, they may speak truthfully even and not be truthful. Fear develops a dual personality, one manifested in the presence of the object feared, the other, perhaps of extremely opposite tendencies, unfolded in the secret chamber of the heart. In a system of ethics based on fear, man is persuaded that he is weak and untrustworthy, that his nature is hopelessly corrupt, unable to master itself except at the lash of a Force lying outside himself. Man, it then would seem, is innately wicked ; his wickedness must be chained by threats of divine wrath and punishment ; he, of his own accord, would not walk in the path that is straight ; he must be forced into it by the gaps and ditches that are lurking dangerously outside this path. Such a system, in which man is convinced that he is unable to take care of himself, build his own character, merely tends to generate moral weakness and cowardice. A system of ethics based on love develops a unified personality, a oneness between thought and action. It enhances, more and more, the moral courage which is basic to man. Through love, man becomes conscious of the great force of goodness and virtue that lie within him. He knows that he is possessed of inherent goodness and godliness, if he knows that in himself is a spark of the divine, a force that makes for perfection. All he needs to do is to allow this divine spark to illuminate and permeate his whole being, and darkness and evil will disappear from his heart." - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein
"A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn't concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image. ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among which they are found, so they blend in with the background; they are also usually broken into odd-shaped fragments. ... In our business, we don't expect to find a whole skull lying on the surface staring up at us. The typical find is a small piece of petrified bone. The fossil hunter's search therefore has to have an infinite number of dimensions, matching every conceivable angle of every shape of fragment of every bone on the human body." - Richard Leakey, fully Richard Erskine Frere Leakey
"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance." - Albert Einstein
"But now that so much is different, it is not up to us to change us? Could not we try to develop ourselves a little, and slowly work our share in the love upon us by and by? It has saved us all their hardships, and it is us slipped under the distractions, such as in a child's game sometimes loading a piece of real lace, and is happy and not happy, and finally lying on broken apart and genome Carlos Menem, worse than anything. We are spoiled by easy enjoyment like all dilettanti and stand the smell of the championship. But what if we despised our successes, as if we were starting from scratch, the work of the love of learning, which was always done for us? What if we went and beginners would, now that many things have changed. " - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain ... But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming ... I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake ... There is nothing more ancient than the truth." - René Descartes
"Stars seen through the white railings filled the heavens with pure light. All the stars from Arcturus to Capella in turn above the elms as seasons passed, and the moon which waxed and waned month by month. Lying on the grass I watched them in the night. Sometimes beneath the trees in the orchard, lying on my back, when the nights were warm I gazed at the sky through the branches of trees which were silvered by the light of the stars, and the sky cut, as it were, into bright pieces by the intervening leaves." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
"A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture." - Robert Bly
"The hill pines were sighing, O'ercast and chill was the day: A mist in the valley lying Blotted the pleasant May." - Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges
"My breast I am smiting, My own sins indicting. How then canst Thou draw me To strife and thus awe me, And bring Me to judgment? My branch hangeth ailing, My eyelid is failing, My aims to derision Are turned by the vision Of Thee bringing judgment. The creditor calleth, The dread decree falleth, The awful day breaking God’s creatures sets quaking In fear of His judgment. Through Thy attributes preaching, Almighty, and teaching, O weigh aberration In the scale of salvation, Nor bring us to judgment. In Thy merciful fashion Award us compassion, That man who but dust is May handle with justice The haters of judgment. Like a vapour evanished, Man is melted and banished, His birth is coëval With a harvest of evil, ’Tis Thou must bring judgment. We await—O behold us— Thy love to enfold us. Did Thy warning not hasten Our impulse to chasten? For the Lord loveth judgment." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Things of God that are marvelous are to be believed on a principle of faith, not to be pried into by reason. For if reason set them open before our eyes, they would no longer be marvelous." - Samuel Gregory
"Be like a river in generosity and giving help. Be like a sun in tenderness and pity. Be like night when covering other's faults. Be like a dead when furious and angry. Be like earth in modesty and humbleness. Be like a sea in tolerance. Be as you are or as you look like." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you all else melted away." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"You're water. We're the millstone. You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes. You're spirit. We're the opening and closing of our hands. You're the clarity. We're the language that tries to say it. You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"I don't need equal time, I am equal time!" - Rush Limbaugh
"A comprehended god is no god" - John Chrysostom, fully Saint John Chrysostom
"Let us allow God to act; He brings things to completion when we least expect it." - Saint Vincent de Paul
"There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities." - Sam Ervin, fully Samuel James "Sam" Ervin, Jr.
"The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday." - Samuel Butler
"To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it." - Samuel Butler
"Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth." - Samuel Butler
"Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness." - Samuel Butler
"I know not any crime so great a man could contrive to commit, as poisoning the sources of eternal truth." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered, than for what they have achieved." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson