This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books . It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranges and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
Books | Force | Little | Order | Position | Universe | Child | Understand |
When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone' s lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.
Books | Events | Learning | Listening | Meaning | Reading | Time |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now... At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. . . Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust.
Books | Discipline | Love | Need | Present | Search | Will |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything, live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Books | Confidence | Feelings | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Patience | People | Search | Trust | Will | Words | Think |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Do not, do not, do not books for ever
Books |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
Books | Love | Need | Patience | Present | Question | Will |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Kites and vultures soar very high indeed, but their gaze is fixed only on the charnel-pit. The pundit has no doubt studied many books and scriptures; he may rattle off their texts, or he may have written books. But if he is attached to women, if he thinks of money and honor as the essential things, will you call him a pundit? How can a man be a pundit if his mind does not dwell on God?
Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
Read at least one book a month. This is self-serving, obviously. It's a proven fact that people who read buy more books than people who don't read. In truth, I wish you'd read ten books a month, or at least buy that many.
Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the worthless books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal. Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
Books |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and ... if they had been any better, I should not have come.
Books |