This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man." - Thomas Paine
"Instruments of religion and science must meet together." - Uttaradhyayana Sutra
"Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"The world is neutral and cannot give meaning to men, If someone wants life to be meaningful he cannot discover that meaning but must provide it himself. How we go about giving meaning to life seems to depend upon the society we accept as our own; a Frenchman might leap into the dark, an American go to a psycho-analyst, and an Englishman cease asking embarrassing questions." - W. D. Joske, fully William "Bill"
"A Child Of God Longing To See Him Beloved - There's not an echo round me, But I am glad should learn, How pure a fire has found me, The love with which I burn. For none attends with pleasure To what I would reveal; They slight me out of measure, And laugh at all I feel. The rocks receive less proudly The story of my flame; When I approach, they loudly Reverberate his name. I speak to them of sadness, And comforts at a stand; They bid me look for gladness, And better days at hand. Far from all habitation, I heard a happy sound; Big with the consolation, That I have often found. I said, 'My lot is sorrow, My grief has no alloy; The rocks replied--'Tomorrow, Tomorrow brings thee joy.' These sweet and sacred tidings, What bliss it is to hear! For, spite of all my chidings, My weakness and my fear, No sooner I receive them, Than I forget my pain, And, happy to believe them, I love as much again. I fly to scenes romantic, Where never men resort; For in an age so frantic Impiety is sport. For riot and confusion They barter things above; Condemning, as delusion, The joy of perfect love. In this sequestered corner, None hears what I express; Delivered from the scorner, What peace do I possess! Beneath the boughs reclining, Or roving o'er the wild, I live as undesigning And harmless as a child. No troubles here surprise me, I innocently play, While Providence supplies me, And guards me all the day: My dear and kind defender Preserves me safely here, From men of pomp and splendour, Who fill a child with fear" - William Cowper
"Hebraism and Hellenism – between these two points of influence moves our world." - William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett
"A successful outcome shows what hard work, perseverance and taking advantage of your opportunities will do for you." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"But, Lord, if we go into the things that are useless why two thirds of the world would have to turn to manual labor. That's really the only essential thing there is. Anyhow they was a good bunch and they had a good convention and it was good to meet 'em." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Two things that tickle the fancy of our citizens, one is let them act on a committee, and the other is to promise to let him walk in a parade. What America needs is more mileage out of our parades." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big-out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"As I struggled to control my feeling, slowly and deliberately, I heard myself saying, rather than said: “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.” In the completely silent room, I fought to control my voice." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"A living creature develops a destructive impulse when it wants to destroy a source of danger. In this case, the destruction or killing of the object is the biologically purposeful goal. The original motive is not pleasure in destruction. Rather the destruction serves the “life instinct”…and is an attempt to avoid anxiety and to preserve the ego in its totality. I destroy in a dangerous situation because I want to live and do not want to have any anxiety. In short, the impulse to destroy serves a primary biological will to live." - Wilhelm Reich
"I do not believe that to be religious in the best, authentic sense a man has to destroy his love life and mummify himself, body and soul." - Wilhelm Reich
"The [genuine] leader will always be aware of the well hidden tendency in people to see things in the mirror only, to take over great things only to render them impotent, to care far more for the admiring of someone than for what he has to offer, to flock around the unimportant and to force the crucial thing toward impotence." - Wilhelm Reich
"The observations in the dark were somehow weird. After the eyes adapted to the darkness, the room did not appear black but grey blue. There were fog like formations and bluish dots and lines of light, violet light phenomena seemed to emanate from the walls as well as from the various objects in the room." - Wilhelm Reich
"You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man." - Wilhelm Reich
"You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas." - Wilhelm Reich
"I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"O the joy of manly self-hood! To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant, known our unknown. To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic. To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye, To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest. To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Trippers and askers surround me, people I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, the latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, my dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, the real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, the sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; these come to me days and nights and go from me again, but they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"They must not fear, nor regard as sin, or take to heart any evil impulses to sin or to blasphemy, or doubts about the Sacrament, or any other such ugly temptations; for to experience these temptations defiles the soul no more than the bark of a dog or the bite of a flea. They trouble the soul but do not harm it provided a man puts them aside and ignores them. It does no good to struggle against them, or to try and master them by force, for the more a person struggles against them, the more persistent they become." - Walter Hilton
"Morality, if it is not fixed by custom and authority, becomes a mere matter of taste determined by the idiosyncrasies of the moralist." - Walter Lippmann
"How does man become mind? Clear intelligence and clear intelligence alone. We know, then, in all that fills heaven and earth there is but this clear intelligence. It is only because of their physical forms and bodies that men are separated. My clear intelligence is the master of heaven and earth and spiritual beings. If heaven is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its height? If earth is deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to look into its depth? If spiritual beings are deprived of my clear intelligence, who is going to distinguish their good and evil fortune or the calamities and blessings that they will bring? Separated from my clear intelligence, there will be no heaven, earth, spiritual beings, or myriad things, and separated from these, there will not be my clear intelligence. Thus they are all permeated with one material force. How can they be separated?" - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
"Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be mis-appraised." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"The basic ideas of investing are to look at stocks as business, use the market's fluctuations to your advantage, and seek a margin of safety. That's what Ben Graham taught us. A hundred years from now they will still be the cornerstones of investing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Rising genius always shoots forth its rays from among clouds and vapors, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady and meridian lustre." - Washington Irving
"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another until death, are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, die into their union with one another as a soul dies into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing..." - Wendell Berry
"I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity. He was the son of a serf but stood calmly before the great without hesitation or nerves. But also—and this was the highest proof of his greatness—he knew the common man, felt his problems, followed his fate." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"Education consists in co-operating with what is already inside a child's mind. A good teacher will nearly always be able to make his points simply by asking a class questions, by making the class realize clearly what they already know "at the back of their minds." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"I have for a long time believed that the thought processes of very young children closely resembled the thought processes of genius." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic." - Walker Percy
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"He was one of those persons whom one loves not because of some lustrous streak of talent (this retired businessman possessed none), but because every moment spent with them fits exactly the gauge of one's life. There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"It turned out to be only our former chauffeur, Tsiganov, who had thought nothing of riding all the way from St. Petersburg, on buffers and freight cars, through the immense, frosty and savage expanse of revolutionary Russia, for the mere purpose of bringing us a very welcome sum of money sent us by good friends of ours. After a month's stay, Tsiganov declared the Crimean scenary bored him and departed---to go all the way back north, with a big bag over his shoulder, containing various articles which we would have gladly given him had we thought he coveted them (such as a tourser press, tennis shoes, a nigthshirt, an alarm clock, a flat iron, several other ridiculous things I have forgotten) and the absence of which only gradually came to light if not pointed out, with vindictive zeal, by an anemic servant girl whose pale charms he had also rifled." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"When a man is in love, jealous, and has been flogged by the Inquisition, he is beside himself." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"All our emotions and thoughts are conditioned reflexes, reactions." - Vimala Thakar
"Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another." - Vimala Thakar
"The call is not to one of the revolutionary formulas of the past; they have failed—why drag them out again even in new regalia? The challenge now is to create an entirely new, vital revolution that takes the whole of life into its sphere. We have never dared embrace the whole of life in all its awesome beauty; we’ve been content to perpetuate fragments, invent corners where we feel conceptually secure and emotionally safe. We could have our safe little nooks and niches were it not for the terrible mess we have made by attempting to break the cosmic wholeness into bite-size bits. It’s an ugly chaos we have created, and we try to remedy the complicated situation with the most superficial of patched-together cures." - Vimala Thakar
"I certainly hope to sell in the course of time, but I think I shall be able to influence it most effectively by working steadily on, and that at the present moment making desperate efforts to force the work I am doing now upon the public would be pretty useless." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to" - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Just try going outside and painting things on the spot! All sorts of things happen then. I had to pick off a good hundred or more flies from [my] canvases ... not to mention dust and sand [nor]the fact that if one carries them through heath and hedgerows for a couple of hours, a branch or two is likely to scratch them ... and that the effects one wants to capture change as the day wears on." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Space… is determinative of the way that we experience things. Time is subservient to it [space] because to have time, there must be a measurable distance to travel during which time can pass." - Vine Deloria, fully Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf