This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.
Knowledge | Purpose | Purpose | Reading | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |
Sa’ib of Tabriz, aka Mirza Muhammad Ali Sa'ib, Saib Isfahani or Sa'ib Of Esfahan NULL
What does it profit you that all the libraries of the world should be yours? Not knowledge but what one does with knowledge is your profit.
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist - this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul - a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
Art | Day | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Music | Past | Play | Present | Soul | Art |
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duties to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
To be sure, the Bible contains the direct words of God. How do we know? The Moral Majority says so. How do they know? They say they know and to doubt it makes you an agent of the Devil or, worse, a Lbr-l Dm-cr-t. And what does the Bible textbook say? Well, among other things it says the earth was created in 4004 BC (Not actually, but a Moral Majority type figured that out three and a half centuries ago, and his word is also accepted as inspired.) The sun was created three days later. The first male was molded out of dirt, and the first female was molded, some time later, out of his rib. As far as the end of the universe is concerned, the Book of Revelation (6:13-14) says: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." … Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
Bible | Devil | Doubt | Earth | Force | Heaven | Majority | People | Revelation | Thinking | Time | Universe | Words | Bible |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all — except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
Books | Good | Ideas | Men | Need | Public | Reading | Rights | Security | Wise |
Michael Jackson, fully Michael Joseph Jackson, aka MJ or King of Pop
Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
The expert, the knowledgeable, the intellectual, has no insight of his own. He depends on borrowed knowledge, on tradition, on convention. He carries libraries in his head, a great burden, but he has no vision. He knows much without knowing anything at all. And because life is not the same ever — it is constantly changing, moment to moment it is new — the expert always lags behind, his response is always inadequate. He can only react, he cannot respond, because he is not spontaneous. He has already arrived to conclusions; he is carrying ready-made answers — and the questions that life raises are always new. Moreover, life is not a logical phenomenon. And the intellectual lives through logic; hence he never fits with life and life never fits with him. Of course life is not at a loss; the intellectual himself is at a loss. He is always feeling like an outsider — not that life has expelled him; he himself has decided to remain outside life. If you cling too much to logic you will never be able to be part of the living process that this existence is. Life is more than logic: life is paradox, life is mystery.
Existence | Insight | Knowing | Life | Life | Logic | Will |
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
I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.
Past |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.
Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
You must write every single day of your life... 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... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.
Wise |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.
Strong and many are the claims made upon us by our mother Earth: the love of locality—the charm and attraction which some one homely landscape possesses to us, surpassing all stranger beauties, is a remarkable feature in the human heart. We who are not ethereal creatures, but of mixed and diverse nature; we who, when we look our clearest towards the skies, must still have our standing-ground of earth secure—it is strange what relations of personal love we enter into with the scenes of this lower sphere. How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality—a place, a country, a local habitation: how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us! here is some sunny garden or summer lane beautified and canonized forever with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places, rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others, where distress or death came once, and since then dwells for evermore.