This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time." - Thomas Nagel
"The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proportion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents." - Thomas Nagel
"Between the dusk of a summer night And the dawn of a summer day, We caught at a mood as it passed in flight, And we bade it stoop and stay. And what with the dawn of night began With the dusk of day was done; For that is the way of woman and man, When a hazard has made them one. Arc upon arc, from shade to shine, The World went thundering free; And what was his errand but hers and mine -- The lords of him, I and she? O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one." - William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
"Here may we prove the pow'r of pray'r, to strengthen faith, and sweeten care; to teach our faint desires to rise, and bring all heav'n before our eyes." - William Cowper
"Prohibition is better than no liquor at all." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely." - Willard Gaylen
"A simultaneous change of our whole economic and social system in favor of drastic decentralization of cities and industries, of the restoration of some more `natural order', more rural, but less urbanized, mechanized, industrialized, proletarized and commercialized. People will not like to face competition unless they have some firm stand. They must not feel lost in this present dehumanized world. Competition is a necessary social arrangement not a social gospel likely to make us enthusiastic. It is a negative concept which derives its strength from the fact that we like the alternatives, i.e., monopoly and collectivism, even less. It must be supplemented by something which is humanly positive." - Wilhelm Röepke
"Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success." - Walter Bagehot
"Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy." - Walter Lippmann
"Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"It takes not one drop of sweat to put off doing anything." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Spend some time observing babies and vow to emulate their joy." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"All the ancient wisdom tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy." - Wendell Berry
"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations." - Wendell Berry
"Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much. We did not make it. Though we drink till we burst, we cannot have it all, or want it all. In its abundance it survives our thirst. In the evening we come down to the shore to drink our fill, and sleep, while it flows through the regions of the dark. It does not hold us, except we keep returning to its rich waters thirsty. We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy." - Wendell Berry
"What works poorly in agriculture — monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting — can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugated nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible." - Wendell Berry
"I now touch nothing stronger than buttermilk: 90-proof buttermilk." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"One cannot expect Miss Jones to revolutionize her outlook overnight. One has to provide her with a steady stream of material, which she can introduce into her existing syllabus as enrichment. In the course of years, she will enlarge her repertoire. All the time, the new material should be as close as possible to what she already knows. This is how revolutions are made; not by taking one big step, but by taking many little steps quickly, one after other." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, as if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, to hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, as if the paradise of meaning ceased to be paradise, it is this to be destitute." - Wallace Stevens
"So she sat down to morning tea, like any other old lady with a high nose, thin cheeks, a ring on her finger and the usual trappings of rather shabby but gallant old age." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"An awakened man has no enemies; even if he has enemies." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"He as the bird perched for an instant on the too frail branch which she feels bending beneath, but sings away all the same, knowing she has wings." - Victor Hugo
"A full jar has been placed upon Time; him, verily, we see existing in many forms. He carries away all these beings (worlds); they call him Time in the highest heaven." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Be convinced of one Truth about Me; Swami will never lay his hand on a task without proper reason and without some profound effect that will flow there from." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Do good and have good done in return; be bad and accept the bad that comes back to you. That is the law; and there is really no help (or) hindrance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"We must maintain the strength of the body to keep it in mind." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The tongue like a sharp knife... Kills without drawing blood." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL
"Love between the ugly, is the most beautiful love of all." - Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
"Evil can be a teacher, if you look at the wisdom of its negative power." - Tom Brown, Jr.
"Experience has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas" - William James
"The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there." - William James
"What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!" - William James
"One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff." - William (Morley Punshon) McFee
"She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
"Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Last spring, David had offered this crazy solution to our woes, only half in jest:... What if we admitted that we make each other nuts, we fight constantly and hardly ever have sex, but we can't live without each other, so we deal with it? And then we could spend our lives together- in misery, but happy to not be apart. Let it be a testimony to how desperately I love this guy that I have spent the last ten months giving that offer serious consideration. The other alternative in the backs of our minds, of course, was that one of us might change. He might become more open and affectionate, not withholding himself from anyone who loves him on the fear that she will eat his soul. Or I might learn how to ... stop trying to eat his soul." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"One of the problems of contemporary culture is that life moves at such a quick pace, we usually don't give ourselves time to feel and listen deeply. You may have to take deliberate action to nurture the soul. If you want to increase your soul's bank account, you may have to seek out the unfamiliar and do things that at first could feel uncomfortable. Give yourself time as you experiment. How will you know if you're on the right track? I like Rumi's counsel: 'When you do something from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.'" - Elizabeth Lesser
"Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are the qualities that characterize the "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist." - Elizabeth Gould Davis
"Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate; As the voyage along thru life; 'Tis the will of the soul That decides its goal, And not the calm or the strife." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Dreams have but one owner at a time. That is why dreamers are lonely." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"If a man watches three football games in a row he should be declared legally dead." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"For her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If I live long enough the luck will change." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"LARRY: [with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey] I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs