This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.
Future |
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave, A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.
Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon — Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, beloved Night — Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon!
When one realizes that one deceives oneself, that one is asleep and one's house is on fire, always, permanently on fire, and that it is only by accident that the fire has not reached one's room at this very moment, when one realizes this, one will want to make efforts to awake and one will not expect any special reward. Since we do not realize that our house is on fire we always expect a special reward. What can one do in sleep? One can only have different dreams -- bad dreams, good dreams, but in the same bed. The dreams may be different, but the bed is the same.
Peter Ustinov, fully Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov
Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.
Conversation | Problems |
To have courage means to claim your freedom, to reconnect with your will power, to reach the source of your resoluteness and determination as a person ... Seizing that freedom, claiming that truth, actually living out our lives in the experience of our freedom means being wiling to face grave anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt. It means facing guilt, anger, and depression -- what Saint John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul" and Jonas called "the belly of the whale." It means that we accept pain as natural to growth, as the actual feeling of maturation. We recognize that the meaning of life is to be deep rather than to have fun, to understand rather than be entertained, to see rather than to be blind. We come face-to-face with our self-deception, with how we deny our true nature. We discover the perniciousness of ignorance and the worthlessness of superficiality. And these become emotional insights and experienced confirmations.
Courage | Depression | Determination | Experience | Freedom | Grave | Ignorance | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Pain | Will | Understand |
The difference between rising at five and seven o'clock in the morning, for the space of forty years, supposing a man to go to bed at the same hour at night, is nearly equivalent to ten additional years to a man's life.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
If a man would allot half an hour every night for self-conversation, and recapitulate with himself whatever he has done, right or wrong, in the course of the day, he would be both the better and the wiser for it.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I'm the only woman who can walk in Central Park at night - and reduce the crime rate.
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Rabbi Chaninah ben Chachinai said: “He who stays awake at night and goes on his way alone and turns his heart to idle thoughts is liable for his life.”
Heart |
Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt and fuse you together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul, instead of two.
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.
The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope.
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
Wine maketh the band quivering, the eye watery, the night unquiet, lewd dreams, a stinking breath in the morning, and an utter forgetfulness of all things... Wine takes away reason, engenders insanity, leads to thousands of crimes, and imposes such an enormous expense on nations.
There is great reason to hope that death is good; for one of two things -- either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man ... even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?
Better | Change | Death | Eternity | Hope | Journey | Life | Life | Man | Men | Reason | Soul | Will | World | Friends | Think |
R. H. Stoddard, fully Richard Henry Stoddard
Day is the Child of Time, and Day must cease to be: but Night is without a sire, and cannot expire, One with Eternity.
R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
That house where the law is not studied by night should be destroyed.
Law |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.