This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If a nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use violence, they must be not helpless but most effective and great men; they would overawe their invader, and make him ridiculous; they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Addictive spirituality creates dependence in the practitioner (frequently to authoritarian leaders and their communities), an avoidance of personal responsibility, and loss of individuality through social controls, such as fear, guilt, or greed for power or bliss. It also tends to suppress rational inquiry into the teachings. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, supports the practitioner's freedom, autonomy, self-esteem, and social responsibility. It is based on experience, rather than belief or dogma; it does not create idols out of spiritual teachers; and it empowers students by emphasizing democratic forms of learning and teaching, rather than the authoritarian model that has dominated spiritual life for millennia." - Ronald S. Miller
"Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time." - Sun Tzu or Sunzi
"Religion in the deepest sense takes shape as we learn through pain and loss that the creativity we exercise over our lives is finite, a mere participation in a greater creative act." - Thomas Moore
"To lose a friend is to suffer the loss of worlds, and to be lacking in friendship altogether is to be cut off, in a deeply felt way, from a richly self-defining way of being in the world." - Thomas Moore
"Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by the careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be saved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints, conditioned by small fidelities, skills, and desires. Soil loss is ultimately a cultural problem; it will be corrected only by cultural solutions." - Wendell Berry
"Every moment can be viewed as new... You cause yourself a great loss by not living in the present... Don’t let the past weigh you down... Realize what is over is over... The future is always an unknown entity so learn to focus on the present... Learn to concentrate on what you are presently doing... Always try to utilize your present moments for growth... If you master feeling joy in your present moments, you need never be concerned you are missing anything, since whatever you are engaged in can be transformed into an elevating experience... You can alleviate pain by living in the present." - Zelig Pliskin
"Prefer a loss to dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time." - Chilon of Lacedemon NULL
"Man becomes virtually an automaton in the loss of his individuality and responsibility. He is the harp of a thousand strings played upon by a divine hand, but not a man!" - John Grier Hibben
"Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk without the loss of esteem. " - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
"The great duty of life is not to give pain; and the most acute reasoner cannot find an excuse for one who voluntarily wounds the heart of a fellow-creature. Even for their own sakes, people should show kindness and regard to their dependants. They are often better served in trifles, in proportion as they are rather feared than loved: but how small is this gain compared with the loss sustained in all the weightier affairs of life! Then the faithful servant shows himself at once as a friend, while one who serves from fear shows himself an enemy." - Frederika Bremer
"'Tis sweet to love; but when with scorn we meet, revenge supplies the loss with joys as great." - George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne
"The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life." - Gretel Ehrlich
"The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Are you afraid to find a loss of self in finding God?" - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one can grieve, nor fear, nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation lies." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn
"The loss of popular respect for religion is the dry rot of social institutions. The idea of God as the Creator and Father of all mankind is in the moral world, what gravitation is in the natural; it holds all together and causes them to revolve around a common center. Take this away, and men drop apart; there is no such thing as collective humanity, but only separate molecules, with no more cohesion than so many grains of sand." - Henry Martyn Field
"Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer." - Herman E. Daly
"Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement. " - Immanual Hermann Fichte
"The evil of our time is the loss of consciousness of evil. " - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free — he has set himself free — for higher dreams, for greater privileges." -
"Humanity may endure the loss of everything; all its possessions may be turned away without infringing its true dignity - all but the possibility of improvement. " - Johann Gottlieb Fichte
"Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising" - John Rawls, fully John Bordley Rawls
"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power. " - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"Our community is in spiritual distress, and some of our organizations are often too concerned with digits. Our disease is a loss of character and commitment, and the cure of our plight cannot be derived from charts and diagrams." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole." - John Peter Zenger
"Man needs a context for his life larger than himself; he needs it so desperately that all modern despairs go back to the fact that he has rejected the only context which the loss of his traditional gods has left accessible. If there is any "somehow good," it must reside in nature herself." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"Not only should we be unashamed of grief, confident that its expression will not permanently hurt us, but we should also possess the wisdom to talk about our loss and through that creative conversation with friends and companions begin to reconstruct the broken fragments of our lives... should not resist the sympathy and stimulation of social interaction. We should learn not to grow impatient with the slow healing process of time . . . We should anticipate these stages in our emotional convalescence: unbearable pain, poignant grief, empty days, resistance to consolation, disinterestedness in life, gradually giving way under the healing sunlight of love,friendship, social challange, to the new weaving of a pattern of action and the acceptance of the irresistible challenge of life." - Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
"In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face." - Karl Mannheim, alternatively Mannheim Károly
"To joy in conquest is to joy in the loss of human life. " - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness." - Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
"In general, kids have very little tolerance for humiliation or failure. One of a student's most important goals is to make it through the day without embarrassment. Imagine then, the frustration of children with differences in learning, who are at risk of growing up deprived of experiencing success. Naturally, they compare themselves to their peers and siblings. While some may see themselves as "different," many will feel inferior. Unfortunately, these feelings are likely to endure. When they do, serious complications can develop including plummeting self- esteem, behavior problems, excessive dependence on peers, alienation from family, deep anxiety, and a loss of motivation. The sad reality is that a difference in learning, not addressed as such, can lead to anti-social behavior, substance abuse, dropping out, and other serious forms of maladjustment." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
"Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why, or what he is saying, or thinking, or scheming -- in a word, anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you -- means a loss of opportunity for some other task." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home - home to a Father’s house - to an eternal home?" - Mark Hopkins
"Kindness... consists in total engagement and in the loss of consciousness." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman
"Every farewell combines loss and new freedom." - Mason Cooley
"Americans live in a twilight world between a sense of loss and a sense of resigned acceptance." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much is the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another. Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it. In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose. Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise." - Max Picard
"Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing techniques, compulsory education - nothing has changed man so much as this lack of relationship with silence; this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe. Man who has lost silence has not merely lost human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby." - Max Picard
"The earth will never be the same again Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif As distant stars participate in the pain. A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf, A dolphin death, O this particular loss A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried If this small one was tossed away as dross, The very galaxies would have lied. How shall we sing our love's song now In this strange land where all are born to die? Each tree and leaf and star show how The universe is part of this one cry, Every life is noted and is cherished, and nothing loved is ever lost or perished." - Madeleine L’Engle
"The earth will never be the same again. Rock, water, tree, iron share this grief As distant stars participate in pain. A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf, A dolphin death, O this particular loss Is Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried, If this small one was tossed away as dross, The very galaxies then would have lied. How shall we sing our love's song now In this strange land where all are born to die? Each tree and leaf and star show how The universe is part of this one cry, That every life is noted and cherished, And nothing loved is ever lost or perished." - Madeleine L’Engle
"Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power." - Michel Foucault
"Does Capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that Property is of greater value than life." - Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney
"That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent, in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles — to the opposite end of the globe." - Nikola Tesla
"We build but to tear down. Most of our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation. Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life. A cheerless view, but true." - Nikola Tesla
"Psychoanalysis arrived to save the human soul in a materialistic era sick with self-consciousness and threatened by loss of belief in immortality and in its public expression, religion. Its greatness resides in having done this in the mind-set of our era, not simply symbolizing the soul exoterically or concretizing it socially as in the past, but attempting to demonstrate it scientifically. But realistic psychology is the death knell of the soul, whose source, nature, and value lie precisely in the abstract, the unfathomable, and the esoteric." - Otto Rank, born Otto Rosenfeld
"The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover. " - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL