This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Today. Mend a quarrel. Search out a friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a love letter. Share some treasure. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in a word or deed. Keep a promise. Find the time. Forego a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand. Flout envy. Examine demands on others. Think first of someone else. Appreciate, be kind, be gentle. Laugh a little more. Deserve confidence. Take up arms against malice. Decry complacency. Express your gratitude. Worship your God. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love. Speak it again. Still speak it again. Speak it still once again." - Author Unknown NULL
"Discovering the ways in which you are exceptional, the particular path you are meant to follow, is your business on this earth, whether you are afflicted or not. It's just that the search takes on a special urgency when you realize you are mortal." - Bernie S. Siegel
"Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth." - Blaise Pascal
"All the glory of greatness has no luster for people who are in search of understanding." - Blaise Pascal
"Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter the temple of wisdom. When we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained something that will stay by us and will serve us again. But if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought, but borrowed it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore, never go abroad in search of your wants: for if they be real wants they will come in search of you. He that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy." - Charles Caleb Colton
"All the universe is an inn; search not specially for a retreat of peace: all the people are your relatives; expect therefore troubles from them." - Chinese Proverbs
"The nature or very essence of phenomena, whether vital or mineral, will always remain unknown... Absolute knowledge could, therefore, leave nothing outside itself; and only on condition of knowing everything could man be granted its attainment. Man behaves as if he were destined to reach this absolute knowledge; and the incessant why which he puts to nature proves it. Indeed, this hope, constantly disappointed, constantly reborn, sustains and always will sustain successive generation sin the passionate search for truth." - Claude Bernard
"Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored." - Daniel Bell
"You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!" - Edwin Way Teale
"Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy… Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness." - Eric Hoffer
"All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride." - Eric Hoffer
"Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern." - Eric Hoffer
"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." - George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
"Religion is the search for a value underlying all things, and as such is the most comprehensive of all the possible philosophies of life." - Gordon Willard Allport
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; not did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and search out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, when they to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"If one should give me a dish of sand, and tell me there were particles of iron in it, I might look for them with my eyes, and search for them with my clumsy fingers, and be unable to detect them; but let me take a magnet and sweep through it, and how would it draw to itself the almost invisible particles by the mere power of attraction. The unthankful heart, like my finger in the sand, discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day, and as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings, only the iron in God's sand is gold!" - Henry Ward Beecher
"Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; he would search for pearls must dive below." - John Dryden
"If peace and survival are to be achieved, the search must almost certainly go beyond the effort to find a balance in thermonuclear terror." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"The search for truth should be the goal of our activities; it is the sole end worthy of them. Doubtless we should first bend our efforts to assuage human suffering, but why? Not to suffer is a negative ideal more surely attained by the annihilation of the world. If we wish more and more to free man from material cares, it is that he may be able to employ the liberty obtained in the study and contemplation of truth." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life... Variation, experiment and insurgence are all of them attributes of freedom." - Lewis Mumford
"The meaning of life is rooted in each person’s search for happiness. Happiness is not something one has to go anywhere to find: The nature of life is happiness. Life knows this about itself, not through analysis or investigation but simply by virtue of being." - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, born Mahesh Prasad Varma
"We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The search after truth is peculiar to man." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it. Do you go home and search for it?" - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"No matter how much we strive to understand, ultimate reality will always remain hidden? Only if the search for truth is motivated by the desire to reach an absolute answer. The person looking for certainty is bound to be disappointed... If on the other hand we realize that the partial truths we uncover are all legitimate aspects of the unknowable universe, then we can learn to enjoy the search and derive from it the pleasure one gets from any creative act... One must painstakingly match one’s preconceptions against actual, ongoing experience to begin separating truth from illusion." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"The desire to lead a more purposeful life, to search for ultimate meanings, is a central theme of human experience... This spiritual urge is undeniable. From the beginning of human history, we have been embarked on a search for transcendent meaning." - Norman Lear, fully Norman Milton Lear
"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude." - Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
"Philosophy is the continuing search for life’s meaning." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
"No heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams." - Paulo Coelho
"The whole of man’s life on the face of Earth can be summed up by that search for his Soul Mate. He may pretend to be running after wisdom, money, or power, but none of that matter. Whatever he achieves will be incomplete if he fails to find his Soul Mate." - Paulo Coelho
"Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind; arrest and search and shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; rush over it like rivers over reeds." - Philip James Bailey
"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge." - Robert Lynd, fully Robert Wilson Lynd
"Most learning consists of extended plateau periods in which we solidify progress through repetitive activity, followed by little spurts of improvement... With repeated practice, we give up our restless search for happiness in the next moment and learn that by inhabiting each moment with full awareness, we experience a deepening sensory aliveness and richness." - Ronald S. Miller
"Man is wise only while in search of wisdom; when he imagines he has attained it, he is a fool." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
"Music is love in search of a word." - Sidney Lanier
"Those who do not live in the single Way fail in both activity and in passivity, assertion and denial. To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality; to assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. To return to the root is to find the meaning, but to pursue appearances is to miss the source. At the moment of inner enlightenment, there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness. The changes that appear to occur in the empty world we call real only because of our ignorance. Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions." - Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
"To each individual in the world will take on a different connotation of meaning - the importance lies in the desire to search for an answer." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"A humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"The humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God, than the deepest search after science." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"To work a Man to thy bent: 1. Know his Inclinations. 2. Observe his Ends. 3. Search out his Weakness. And So thou mayst either draw or drive him." - Thomas Fuller
"So little trouble do men take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand." - Thucydides NULL
"False wit is a fatiguing search after cunning traits, an affectation of saying in enigmas what others have already said naturally, to hang together ideas which are incompatible, to divide that which ought to be united, of seizing false relations." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Let us leave every man free to search within himself and lose himself in his ideas." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Prayer is a cup held high to be filled. It is an inward quest for inspiration. It is mentally reaching out of the great thoughts and illuminations of man in his continual search for meaning." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson