This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The instinct for justice, when equipped with all the resources of technology, is capable of laying waste to the earth itself." - Georges Bernanos
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." - Haida Proverbs
"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. They are born with the tragedy that they have to grow up . . . a lot of people don't have the courage to do it." - Helen Hayes
"The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessary we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious can of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated." - Henry James
"The earth is a Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise - it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us some a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away; of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The highest order that was ever instituted on earth is the order of faith." - Henry Ward Beecher
"What would the nightingale care if the toad despised her singing? She would still sing on, and leave the cold toad to his dark shadows. And what care I for the sneers of men who grovel upon earth? I will still sing on in the ear and bosom of God." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air." - Herman Melville
"Earth laughs at him who calls a place his own." - Hindu Proverbs
"The money, technology, and human energy now devoted to the military could perform miracles in cleaning up the earth we live on. But the cost of the arms race is not only the enormous waste of resources. There is a psychic cost - the creation of an atmosphere of fear all over the world." - Howard Zinn
"The earth covers the errors of the physician." - Italian Proverbs
"Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities without help, with no aim but what he sets himself." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change. No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's character. But as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting on the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue." - Jeremy Bentham
"The earth is bathed in music... The drive towards 'synchonicity' and harmony is elemental and universal so it becomes comprehensible that the 'hidden' harmony within ourselves provides us with the strength to find the 'hidden' harmony in the cosmos and universe. The more 'chaotic' and 'atonal' the cluster, the more quickly the harmony develops. Disharmony is a springboard fostering the harmony within ourselves." - Joachim-Ernst Berendt
"I cannot conceive that God could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on the earth. If I did not believe in the future state I should believe in no God." - John Adams
"‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." - John Keats
"`Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." - John Keats
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we wake." - John Milton
"Many a man lives a burden upon the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond life." - John Milton
"There are three material things, not only useful, but essential to life. No one “knows how to live” till he has got them. These are pure air, water and earth. There are three immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also. These are admiration, hope and love. Admiration - the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible form and lovely in human character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form and to become what is lovely in character. Hope - the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them. Love - both of family and neighbor, faithful and satisfied." - John Ruskin
"The Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth." - John Ruskin
"All faces resemble each other, yet how easily we see in each uniqueness, individuality, an identity. How deeply we value these differences... Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"By anticipation we suffer misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more." - Joseph Addison
"The elementary idea, likewise, of the Promised Land cannot originally have referred to a part of this earth to be conquered by military right, but to a place of spiritual peace in the heart, to be discovered through contemplation." - Joseph Campbell
"This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." - Joseph Campbell
"The naturalist fallacy draws a conclusion about what ought to be, based on what is. The fact that people believe something to be true, whether it be the flatness of the earth or the morality of slavery, does not make it true or moral." - Judith A. Boss
"Marriage is the union of two divinities that a third might be born on earth. It is the union of two souls in a strong love for the abolishment of separateness. It is that higher unity which fuses the separate unites within the two spirits. It is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance, and whose ending is Eternity." - Kahlil Gibran
"Suppose you were compelled to give up - to forget all the words you know except seven - what seven words would you keep?... The most important words to keep are: You and I... without these two there would need to be no others... You, I, Give, God, Love, Beauty, Earth." - Kahlil Gibran
"All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence." - Kahlil Gibran
"Happiness on earth is but a fleet, passing ghost, which man craves at any cost in gold or time. And when the phantom becomes the reality, man soon wearies of it." - Kahlil Gibran
"Is there any place where there is no traffic in empty talk? Is there on this earth one who does not worship himself talking." - Kahlil Gibran
"The soul is an embryo in the body of man, and the day of death is the day of awakening, for it is the great era of labour and the rich hour of creation... Death is an ending to the son of the earth, but to the soul it is the start, the triumph of life... Death removes but the touch, and not the awareness of all good. And he who has lived one spring or more possesses the spiritual life of one who has lived a score of springs." - Kahlil Gibran
"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the good ness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life." - Kahlil Gibran
"Evolution... is comprehensible only if we admit that it is dominated by a finality, a precise and distant goal... telefinality orients the march of evolution as a whole and has acted, ever since the appearance of life on earth, as a distant directing force tending to develop a being endowed with a conscience, a spiritually and morally perfect being. To attain this goal, this force acts on the laws of the unorganized world in such a way that the normal play of the second law of thermodynamics is always deflected in the same direction." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
"We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying unable to sit still." - Lewis Thomas
"Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness’ and only to him was the land infested with “wild” animals and “savage” people. To use it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the “Wild West” began." - Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
"Physics has discovered the edge of infinity; the wisdom of the ages takes us across the border, which is nowhere but in us. When each person rejoins the stream of evolution that upholds the galaxies ands sweeps life forward on the wave of eternity, human existence will cease to contain any suffering, and our real purpose in living - to create heaven on earth - will be realized." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma
"In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"The meaning of life is that we love one another. The purpose of our lives, it seems to me, is to learn how to do that, so we can create a world where everyone’s in love with everyone all the time. That would be Heaven on earth." - Marianne Williamson
"God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children." - Mary Howitt
"Peace on earth cannot happen without peace with the earth and peace among all earth creatures." - Matthew Fox
"There is a spirit in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, itself wholly spiritual. In this principle is God, ever verdant, every flowering in all the joy and glory of His actual Self. Sometimes I have called this principle the Tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual Light, anon I say it is a Spark. But now I say that it is more exalted over this and that than the heavens are exalted above the earth. So now I name it in a nobler fashion... It is free of all names and void of all forms. It is one and simple, as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
"Love on earth begins at home." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much: Who has gained the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children: Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task: Who has left the world better than he has found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul: Who has never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it: Who has looked for the best in others and given the best he had: Whose life was an inspiration: whose memory is a benediction." - Bessie Anderson Stanley, fully Elizabeth-Anne "Bessie" Anderson Stanley