This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong. Which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." - Alexander Pope
"The sacred begins at the tip of your tongue. Be careful when speaking. You create the world around you with your words." - Native American Proverbs
"Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure." - Edward Thorndike, fully Edward Lee "Ted" Thorndike
"Actions lie louder than words." - Carolyn Wells
"Big words seldom accompany good deeds." - Charlotte Elizabeth Whitton
"Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous." - Abd-el-Kader or Abdul Qadir NULL
"We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." - Abigail Adams
"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"Lying is done with words, and also with silence." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
"Simple are the words of truth." - Aeschylus NULL
"When deeds speak, words are nothing." - African Proverbs
"Words may point the way to Truth, but actions demonstrate it. Live in accordance with the highest awareness of the Truth that you know. There is no greater purpose in life than this one." - Alan Cohen
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." - Alan Cohen
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." -
"Quiet and unacclaimed acts are, to me, the real margin of greatness. Greatness is not in popularity, wealth, or long life, as most people believe. Real greatness is in simplicity and supportive words. It is in firm encouragement and gentle patience. It is in finding god in the midst of the turmoil of the marketplace, and remembering His goodness during hardship. No, greatness is not always found in those whom the world calls its heroes, but in the unheard of saints who unselfishly serve their families, lend a kind ear to a friend in despair, and lovingly see the Best in those who have become too accustomed to seeing themselves as mediocre." -
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." -
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." -
"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things." -
"Success in marriage requires continence as well as potency. In other words, character is indispensable in well-ordered sexual life." - Alexis Carrel
"Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement." - Alfred Adler
"Be sincere. Be simple in words, manners and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct. If you can make a man laugh, you can make him think and make him like and believe you." - Alfred Emmanuel Smith
"Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate sense which we term civilization. In each there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Actions speak louder than words." - American Proverbs
"To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning." - Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
"Symbols are deeper than words; speak when words become silent; gain where words lose in meaning; and so in hours of holiest worship the Church teaches, by symbols, truth language may not utter." - Andrew Martin Fairbairn
"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity. Godlike, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
"How true Daddy’s words were when he said: “All children must look after their own upbringing.” Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands." - Anne Frank, fully Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank
"Giving much thought to the future is vain. Only one task is worthy of the doing and that is to express the Here and Now. And to express means building, out of the infinite diversity of the Here and Now, a visage dominating it. It means shaping silence out of stones. Any other claim is but an ado of words that weave the wind." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Man is what he is, not that which can be expressed. True the aim of all awareness is to express that which is, but expression is a slow, elusive task, and it is a mistake to assume that anything incapable of being stated in words does not exist." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Mankind I know not; I know men. Not freedom, but free men. Not happiness, but happy men. Not beauty, but beautiful things. Not God, but the pure flame of tapers. Those who bend their minds on definitions otherwise than as wellsprings of significance, prove but the void of their hearts, and their own inanity. And they will neither live nor die, for men do not live or die by words." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"More wisdom is latent in things-as-they-are than in all the words men use." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over." - Arthur Koestler
"The best antidote against evils of all kinds, against the evil thoughts that haunt the soul, against the needless perplexities which distract the conscience, is to keep hold of the good we have. Impure thoughts will not stand against pure words and prayers and deeds. Little doubts will not avail against great certainties. Fix your affections on things above, and then you will less and less be troubled by the cares, the temptations, the troubles of things on earth." - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley