This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Any man or woman who neglects to maintain inward vigilance, and only makes an outward show of holiness in dress, speech, and behavior, is a wretched creature. For they watch the doings of other people and criticize their faults, imagining themselves to be something when in reality they are nothing. In this way they deceive themselves. Be careful to avoid this, and devote yourself inwardly to His likeness by humility, charity, and other spiritual virtues. In this way you will be truly converted to God." - Walter Hilton
"The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behavior or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"A willful fault has no excuse, and deserves no pardon." - Welsh Proverbs
"My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like dental and transcendental (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch-- words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons-- so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"It is untrue to say a man has made his fortune when he is not capable of enjoying it." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The art of pleasing is the art of deception." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"There is no man who has sense enough to dow never boring." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"A worthy man is still worthy even penniless, a donkey is a donkey even if he is finely saddled." - Turkish Proverbs
"Good advice is given; good esteem is no given." - Turkish Proverbs
"Good advice may be communicated, but not good manners." - Turkish Proverbs
"Grapes will darken by looking at each other." - Turkish Proverbs
"Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow." - Tibetan Proverbs
"One has to know joy and pain to recognize happiness and misfortune." - Tibetan Proverbs
"My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
"Internalization. This occurs when you've exploited impact, when you've molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you've made your new skills strong through hard use. All of a sudden these new concepts stopped churning within you, and a new reality is born You and the concepts are one. They have literally become you. You have become them." - Tom Hopkins
"There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. " - Brendan Francis Behan
"The rest of you... keep banging the rocks together." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"O friendship! thou divinest alchemist, that man should ever profane thee!" - Douglas William Jerrold
"Good and bad fortune are found severally to visit those who have the most of the one or the other." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"It's easier to be wise for others than for ourselves." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Never was any considerable good or evil done without producing its like. We imitate good actions through emulation; and bad ones through the evil of our nature, which shame conceals, but example sets at liberty." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"There is no accident so disastrous that a clever man cannot derive some profit from it; nor any so fortunate that a fool cannot turn it to his disadvantage." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Give never the wolf the weather to keep." - English Proverbs
"In fact, life itself is a contradiction if only because birth is the direct cause, in every single case, of death" - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalising actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrel's delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naïve." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today your own-but only that; the rest belongs to chance." - Euripedes NULL
"The proper business of friendship is to inspire life and courage; and a soul thus supported outdoes itself; whereas if it be unexpectedly deprived of these succors it droops and languishes." - Eustace Budgell
"American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken