This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries as soon as he has, he wants to reestablish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -- and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being.
Now, if in facing sorrow the mind has a motive, that is, if it wants to do something about sorrow, there can be no understanding of sorrow any more than there can be love if there is a motive for love. Do you understand? Most of us have a motive when we look at sorrow; we want to do something about it.
Love | Mind | Sorrow | Understanding | Wants |
The man who is seeking comfort does not want truth; he only wants security, safety, a refuge in which he will not be disturbed. But a man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood.
Comfort | Man | Tribulations | Truth | Wants | Will | Crisis |
Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit, it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.
Creativity | Experience | Longing | Mystical | Nature | Poetry | Silence | Spirit | Wants | World |
Leadership is leaders acting – as well as caring, inspiring and persuading others to act – for cetain shared goals that represent the values – the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations – of themselves and the people they represent. And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders care about, visualize, and act on their own and their followers’ values and motivations.
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
An eye is meant to see things. The soul is here for its own joy. A head has one use: For loving a true love. Feet: To chase after. Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind, for learning what men have done and tried to do. Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why. A lover is always accused of something. But when he finds his love, whatever was lost in the looking comes back completely changed.
Art doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable.
Wants |
Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to the useful arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other tools than his; and therefore I say that the man of science who follows his studies into their practical application is false to his calling. The practical man stands ever ready to take up the work where the scientific man leaves it, and adapt it to the material wants and uses of daily life.
Man | Science | Usefulness | Wants | Work |
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
You can not divorce religious belief and public service. I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Wants |
John Fowles, fully John Robert Fowles
Nobody wants to be a nobody. All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mask the emptiness we feel at the core.
Wants |
Joe Namath, fully Joseph William Namath, aka Willie Joe and Broadway Joe
To be a leader, you have to make people want to follow you, and nobody wants to follow someone who doesn't know where he is going.
The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth. You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions, in their own time were scientifically correct. That is to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age. So there must be a scientifically validated image. Now you know what has happened: our scientific field has separated itself from the religious field, or vice-versa. … This divorce this is a fatal thing, and a very unfortunate thing, and a totally unnecessary thing.
Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.
Life | Life | Wants | Understand |
The world isn't purposeful. It isn't ruled by reason. The world wants to play. Fashion queens have always aroused more interest than future generations and their fate.