This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all....It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming." - Paul Davies
"Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool." - Paul Gaugin, fully Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
"Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution. " - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"An unsuccessful man often keeps success away by the impression of his former failures." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
"Our soul is blessed with the impression of the glory of God whenever we praise Him." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
"You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken... Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? " - Plato NULL
"As a fresh wound shrinks from the hand of the surgeon, then gradually submits to and even calls for it; so a mind under the first impression of a misfortune shuns and rejects all comfort, but at length, if touched with tenderness, calmly and willingly resigns itself." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL
"Besides, as is usually the case, we are much more affected by the words which we hear, for though what you read in books may be more pointed, yet there is something in the voice, the look, the carriage, and even the gesture of the speaker, that makes a deeper impression upon the mind." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL
"There is one taboo that has withstood all the recent efforts at demystification: the idealization of mother love. The usual run of biographies illustrates this very clearly. In reading the biographies of famous artists, for example, one gains the impression that their lives began at puberty. Before that, we are told, they had a happy, contented, or untroubled childhood, or one that was full of deprivation or very stimulating. But what a particular childhood really was like does not seem to interest these biographers-as if the roots of a whole life were not hidden and entwined in its childhood." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression which classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced that within the framework of the applicability of its basic concepts, it will never be overthrown." - Albert Einstein
"I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: "If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight." I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation." - Albert Einstein
"It may seem that water dripping on hard stone could not make any impression, yet when water drips on stone continuously for many years, it can literally wear a hole in the stone. We actually see this. Even if your heart is like stone and it seems that your words of prayer are making no impression at all, still, as the days and years pass, your heart of stone will also be softened." - Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav or Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Nachman from Uman NULL
"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance towards a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us." - Randolph Bourne, fully Randolph Silliman Bourne
"Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
"One receives the impression from his writings that he made it his plan to read any book whatever that no one else can bear to read." - Robertson Davies
"Adversity has ever been considered as the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being free from flatterers." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being." - Simone Weil
"It is a question of cubic capacity, said he; a man with so large a brain must have something in it." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"My friend's wiry arms were around me and he was leading me to the chair. You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake say that you're not hurt! It was worth a wound -it was worth many wounds- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay? beyond that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"First-time teachers should enter the classroom with a deliberate and grave air, head held high and looking at all the students in a bold manner, as if they had thirty years’ experience." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL
"In natural history, great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known." - Stephan Jay Gould
"So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way. And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery." - Stephan Jay Gould
"So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
"In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves." - Thomas Berry
"The nearer any soul draws to God, the more humble will that soul lie before God...the most holy men have always been the most humble men...If the work be good, though never so low, humility will put a hand to it; so will not pride." - Thomas Brooks
"Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joints, but so many Wheels, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, Man." - Thomas Hobbes
"The difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he." - Thomas Hobbes
"Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it… One advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd." - Thomas Nagel
"Adventure is the vitaminizing element in histories both individual and social." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"A very remarkable work... in the present state of light literature in England - a novel that actually tells a story... it has another extraordinary merit - it isn't written by a woman." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity?" - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Without order or authority in the spirit of man the free way of life leads through weakness, disorganization, self-indulgence, and moral indifference to the destruction of freedom itself. The tragic ordeal through which the Western world is passing was prepared in the long period of easy liberty, during which men . . . forgot that their freedom was achieved by heroic sacrifice. . . They forgot that their rights were founded on their duties. . . They thought it clever to be cynical, enlightened to be unbelieving, and sensible to be soft." - Walter Lippmann
"When any duty is to be done, it is fortunate for you if you feel like doing it; but, if you do not feel like it, that is no reason for not doing it." - Washington Gladden
"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher." - Walker Percy
"A little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I need to become beautiful, become remarkable, become unforgettable, become someone’s everything." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"The gentle and vague regions in which I moved assets were poets, not the land of crime" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: honey-colored kins, 'thin arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big bright mouth_; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes on the dark inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would—invariably, with icy precision—plump for the former." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"What is done in love is done well." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh