This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions." - Alan Barth
"Industry is not only the instrument of improvement, but the foundation of pleasure. He who is a stranger to it may possess, but cannot enjoy; for it is labor only which gives relish to pleasure. It is the appointed vehicle of every good to man. It is the indispensable condition of possessing a sound mind in a sound body." - Hugh Blair
"A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes he is no longer indispensable." - Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
"Grief or misfortune seems to be indispensable to the development of intelligence, energy and virtue. The proofs to which the people are submitted, as with individuals, are necessary then to draw them from their lethargy, to disclose their character." - Fearon NULL
"A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into the course of psychic events... The unconscious must be accepted as the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic function." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Head knowledge is good, but heart knowledge is indispensable. The training of the hands and feet must be added to make a rounded education. We must all learn these days to become spiritual pioneers if we would save the world from chaos." - Evey Hammond
"The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Industry is not only the instrument of improvement, but the foundation of pleasure. He who is a stranger to it may possess, but cannot enjoy, for it is labor only which give relish to pleasure. It is the indispensable condition of possessing a sound mind in a sound body, and is the appointed vehicle of every good to man." -
"Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins." - Isaac D'Israeli
"It has always seemed to me that ruthlessness and arrogant self-confidence constitute the indispensable condition for what, when it succeeds, strike us as greatness. And I also believe that one ought to differentiate between greatness of achievement and greatest of personality." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten... America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense. " - Walter Lippmann
"Life is easier to take than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable." - Kathleen Norris
"Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the loftiest kind thereof comes only of a religious stock - from consciousness of obligation and dependence upon God." - Joseph Parker
"In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man." -
"Cities have their indispensable purposes, and their charms, not the least of which is that you can be alone in a crowd. But that kind of living alone is an acquired taste, and not for the weak or unfortunate. they are apt to learn that no city’s institutions can provide protective supports like those of an extended family or real community." - George Frederick Will
"An innate knowledge, or rather an acquired ignorance, suggests to it straightaway the step to be taken, the decisive act, the unanswerable word. Yet effort remains indispensable, endurance and perseverance likewise. But they come of themselves, they develop of their own accord, in a soul acting and acted upon, whose liberty coincides with the divine activity." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"Prayer is not a vain attempt to change God’s will: it is a filial desire to learn God’s will and share it. Prayer is not a substitute for work: it is the secret spring and indispensable ally of all true work – the clarifying of work’s goal, the purifying of its motives, and the renewing of its zeal." - George Arthur Buttrick
"Religious faith must link us to communities of shared memory and shared hope with which we can join in symbolizing our human condition and in enacting the visions that can animate give new life. Religious faith cannot be reduced to the ethical or to the merely utilitarian. But, as part of this larger and indispensable contribution that religious faith can provide to making and keeping life human, it needs also to be held accountable for the renewal and extension of a universal covenant with being. It needs to be held accountable for its broader contribution to good faith on earth." - James W. Fowler III
"At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education." - Paul Fussell
"To be fruitful in invention, it is indispensable to have a habit of observation and reflection." - Abraham Lincoln
"Success in marriage requires continence as well as potency. In other words, character is indispensable in well-ordered sexual life." - Alexis Carrel
"Properly understood, prayer is a mature activity indispensable to the fullest development of personality - the ultimate integration of man’s highest faculties. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength." - Alexis Carrel
"What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it. What another would have written, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and there make yourself indispensable." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"Make yourself indispensable." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"If one wishes to advocate a free society - that is, capitalism - one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"To be without some part of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience, unsullied by the reproach of remembrance of an unworthy action." - Edward Gibbon
"The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience." - Edward Gibbon
"Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership." - Eric Hoffer
"Friends must desire to live as much as possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures. Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them, and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human medium through which it beheld the good." - George Santayana
"Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one." - Hannah Arendt
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion." - Immanuel Kant
"Synthesis in general... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the sul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious." - Immanuel Kant
"Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state. This does not mean that a man’s circumstances at any given time are an indication of his entire character, but that those circumstances are so intimately connected with some vital thought element within himself that, for the time being, they are indispensable to his development." -
"In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge bout myself. This being so, in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call inter-subjectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and what others are." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good." - John Foster Dulles
"A people in a state of savage independence, in which every one lives for himself, exempt, unless by fits, from any external control, is practically incapable of making any progress in civilization until it has learnt to obey. The indispensable virtue, therefore, in a government which establishes itself over a people of this sort is, that it make itself obeyed." - John Stuart Mill
"Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it, every one who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest." - John Stuart Mill
"Technology made larger populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable." - Joseph Wood Krutch