This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work. Work is not a curse; it is the prerogative of intelligence, the only means to manhood, and the measure of civilization." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
"Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime." - John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
"In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false." - Edgar Degas, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas
"We never seem to know what anything means till we have lost it. The full significance of those words, property, ease, health - the wealth of meaning that lies in the fond epithets, parent, child friend, we never know till they are taken away; till in place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow where nothing is - where we stretch our hands in vain, ands strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity." - Orville Dewey
"One watch set right will do to set many by; one that goes wrong may be the means of misleading a whole neighborhood; and the same may be said of example." - Lewis Dilwyn, fully Monsignor Dilwyn W Lewis
"It is arrogance to think that the earthbound have any true grasp of the complex meaning, or meanings, of life; we have not yet gathered all the data. Our own significance, our ultimate potential and our ensemble of possible destinies will be understood only by finding and studying the other intelligent creatures of space. Thus, a prime task for us is to seek these other intelligent civilizations and join them in shared knowledge. We now have the means to do so, and if we are as noble as we think, we will proceed vigorously with this enterprise." - Frank Drake
"He that resolves upon any great and good end, has, by the very resolution, scaled the chief barrier to it. He will find such resolution removing difficulties, searching out or making means, giving courage for despondency, and strength for weakness and like the star to the wise men of old, ever guiding him nearer and nearer to perfection." - Tyron Edwards
"It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curious of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." - Albert Einstein
"Those who rage today against the ideals of reason and of individual freedom, and seek to impose an insensate state of slavery by means of brutal force, rightly see in the Jews irreconcilable opponents." - Albert Einstein
"What is the sense of our life? What is the sense of the life of any living being at all? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: What is the sense of putting this question at all? I answer: He who feels that his own life or that of his fellow-beings is senseless is not only unhappy, but hardly capable of living." - Albert Einstein
"With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." - Friedrich Engels
"The universal of an atom containing emptiness and existence. This means that the atom has no intrinsic nature, so it is empty; yet its illusory characteristics are evident, so it is existent. Indeed, because illusory form has no essence, it must be no different from emptiness, and real emptiness contains qualities permeating to the surface of existence. Seeing that form is empty produces great wisdom and not dwelling in birth-and-death; seeing that emptiness is form produces great compassion and not dwelling in nirvana. When form and emptiness are nondual, compassion and wisdom are not different; only this is true seeing." - Fazang, also Fa-Tsang or Fāzàng NULL
"Discontent is like ink poured into water, which fills the whole fountain full of blackness. It casts over the mind, and renders it more occupied about the evil which disquiets than about the means of removing it." - Owen Feltham
"'As above, so below' means that the two worlds are instantaneously seen to be one when we realize our essential unity with God... The One and the many, time and eternity, are all One." - Reshad Feild, born Richard Timothy Feild
"Next to temperance, a quiet conscience, a cheerful mind, and active habits, I place early rising as a means of health and happiness." - Timothy Flint
"Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." - Michel Foucault
"Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society." - Felix Frankfurter
"There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means - either may do - the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier." - Benjamin Franklin
"An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"There is a means of return from fantasy to reality, and that is art." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"To be sure, if it is the purpose of educators to stifle the child’s power of independent thought as early as possible, in order to produce that ‘good behavior’ which is so highly prized, they cannot do better than deceive children in sexual matters and intimidate them by religious means. The stronger characters will, it is true, withstand these influences; they will become rebels against the authority of their parents and later against every other form of authority. When children do not receive the explanations for which they turn to their elders, they go on tormenting themselves in secret with the problem, and produce attempts at solution in which the truth they have guessed is mixed up in the most extraordinary way with grotesque inventions; or else they whisper confidences to each other which, because of the sense of guilt in the youthful inquirers, stamp everything sexual as horrible and disgusting." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"In the sphere if material things, giving means being rich. Not he who has is rich, but he who gives much. The hoarder who is anxiously worried about losing something is, psychologically speaking, the poor impoverished man, regardless of how much he has. Whoever is capable of giving of himself is rich." -
"Nations like men, can be healthy and happy, though comparatively poor... Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally." - John Galsworthy
"By means of rational thought we have reached the opinion that God knows in advance only the possibilities open to a man in his freedom, not the particular decisions he will make.. It is the opinion of our religion that God never changes... and yet we find in the words of the prophets that God does repent over some things... It is impossible to solve this contradiction if we adopt the view that God knows particular things as particulars." - Gersonides, abbreviation of first letters as RalBaG from Levi ben Gerson NULL
"The man who comes up with a means of doing or producing almost anything better, faster, or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips." - J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty
"I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"I have never advocated war, except as a means of peace." - Ulysses S. Grant, fully Ulysses Simpson Grant, born Hiram Ulysses Grant
"Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person’s very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life." -
"It is great to have friends when one is young, but indeed it is still more so when you are getting old. When we are young, friends are, like everything else, a matter of course. In the old days we know what it means to have them." - Edvard Grieg, fully Edvard Hagerup Grieg
"We crave freedom, but freedom is never an end in itself; it is a means to be used for further aims. Its value lies in the extent to which it can assist the development of life. To possess freedom with no life for which to use it is but the bitterest farce. Life never means complete freedom, and every action and relation is an added bond. Life is to be attained, not through a non-moral freedom of caprice, but through a glad welcoming and loyal fulfillment of every bond and obligation which comes in the daily path of life." - Edward Howard Griggs
"No man is rich whose expenditures exceed his means; and no one is poor whose incomings exceed his outgoings." - Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
"Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, flowers, water and love. Of course, if the spectator be without the last, the whole will present but a pitiful appearance; and, in that case, the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for fuel, the flowers are classified by stamens, and the water is simply wet." - Heinrich Heine
"The essential element of successful strategy is that it derives its success from the differences between competitors with a consequent difference in their behavior. Ordinarily, this means that any corporate policy and plan which is typical of the industry is doomed to mediocrity. Where this is not so, it should be possible to demonstrate that all other competitors are at a distinct disadvantage." - Bruce Doolin Henderson
"Our children should be fitted for bread-winning, but they should be taught that bread-winning is only a means, not the purpose in life, and that the value of life is to be judged... by the good and the service to God with which it is filled." - Samson Raphael Hirsch
"Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well." - Henry Scott Holland
"You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts. Every expansion of government in business means that government in order to protect itself from the political consequences of its errors and wrongs is driven irresistibly without peace to greater and greater control of the nation’s press and platform. Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"History is a story of growth, decay and change. If no provision, no allowance is made for change by peaceful means, it will come anyway - and with violence." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"Man is going to evolve. It is our destiny. As in any evolution, parts of us will die in order for other parts to be born. Choosing at each moment the feelings, attitudes and values - acceptance, cooperation, caring, loving, forgiving - that will be the building blocks of the emerging reality is what it means to choose to evolve. At each moment we can choose to behave as natives of this new reality and co-creators in our evolution." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
"What a man generally means when he says that he is not a politician I am afraid is this - that he has been all his life enjoying his political privileges and neglecting his political duties." - Hugh Price Hughes
"It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature." - David Hume
"Notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other... These principles of association are reduced to three, viz. Resemblance... Contiguity... Causation... as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are only ties of our thought, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them." - David Hume
"Old disease patterns keep replicating themselves when the old thought patterns stay the same. All healing techniques serve to bring about a change in consciousness, which means a new expectancy of wholeness. What you expect at the deepest level is what you get. Your body loves to hear the truth about itself. Your body cannot help but respond to an awareness of and an expectancy of wholeness." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla