This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"These repeated forgeries and falsifications create a well-founded suspicion that all the cases spoken of concerning the person called Jesus Christ are made cases, on purpose to lug in, and that very clumsily, some broken sentences from the Old Testament." - Thomas Paine
"The old year has slipped through the glass of time, taking with it a portion of my life. For me a face has faded, a voice is stilled, a chair is empty; precious ambitions lay scattered like broken alabaster boxes, and my sky is oft tarnished by the low-hanging clouds of failure. But I stand again at the threshold of eternity—the Land of Beginning Again—where the New Year woos with an enchanting hope. So I plight my troth to the Mystic Comrade by my side, who teaches me to read the meaning of life in the light of its high hours. In my scars I see the ministry of redemption, and in my slow-healing wounds I read the gospel of Triumphant Life. Each morn the world wrapped in winsome smiles unfolds, and I know the best is yet to be. All through the year I shall work and play, sing and pray, dream and hope, suffer and love; for I was as one lonely and have found anew a friend who walked ever by my side. And since I have come out of the Silence, and shall return again into the Silence, as a pilgrim of time I will walk with faith the streets of years. " - Waldemar Argow, fully Wendelin Waldemar Wieland Argow
"The mass of Americans, who vehemently made known their views in (and during) a recent general election, know perfectly well that they are not living in a reign of terror and that they seldom look behind a door for anything more frightening than an umbrella." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated, mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, it launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits." - Wendell Berry
"The supposedly solid human body turns out to be an intricate interweaving of energy fields; where disease is not an entity but rather a fixated warp of energy fields; where the experience of Unconditional Love transcends the limitations of personal love; where mortality itself dies-and becomes immortality-and where I accept the Divine nature of all life forms, simultaneously physical and nonphysical, structured and non-structured, existing and not existing in any particular form at any given moment." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"One day a young girl watched her mother prepare a ham for baking. At one point the daughter asked, “Mom, why did you cut off both ends of the ham?” “Well, because my mother always did,” said the mother. “But why?” “I don’t know—let’s go ask Grandma.” So they went to Grandma’s and asked her, “Grandma, when you prepared the ham for baking, you always cut off both ends—why did you do that?”" - Vicki Robin
"The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"But you're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only in the hands of a bad workman." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other areas is going to shift to open-source communities." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"The seed of revolution is repression." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
"If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn't see herself as average." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
"One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion and passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing submission with weakness, whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend." - Elif Safak
"He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don't talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you're doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better every day." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I became one of those annoying people who always say Ciao! Only I was extra annoying, since I would always explain where the word ciao comes from. (If you must know, it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval Venetians as an intimate salutation: Sono il suo schiavo! Meaning: I am your slave!) Just speaking these words made me feel sexy and happy. My divorce lawyer told me not to worry; she said she had one client (Korean by heritage) who, after a yucky divorce, legally changed her name to something Italian, just to feel sexy and happy again." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I remember saying once to my friend Susan, when my marriage was becoming intolerable, I don't want my children growing up in a household like this. Susan said, Why don't you leave those so-called children out of the discussion? They don't even exist yet. Why can't you just admit that you don't want to live in unhappiness anymore?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK because he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that--he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Ketut, why is life all crazy like this? I asked my medicine man the next day...So what can we do about the craziness of the world? Nothing. Ketut laughed, but with a dose of kindness. This is nature of world. This is destiny. Worry about your craziness only-make you in peace." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of ones self- sovereignty." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Well, I do not think that women should train in the Ann Coulter School of Opinion-Hurling. I avoid leaving teeth marks on innocent ankles. We don't need more women — or men — in the Strunk and Food Fight Stylebook. There are many ways to be heard. But writing out loud, saying what you think on the op-ed page or in the blogosphere, on talk radio or in politics, requires a little hide-toughening." - Ellen Goodman
"Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease. With "smart" technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, says that "people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless," he is not wrong: This is the future we're headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there. A more humane smart-design paradigm would happily acknowledge that the task of technology is not to liberate us from problem-solving. Rather, we need to enroll smart technology in helping us with problem-solving. What we want is not a life where friction and frustrations have been carefully designed out, but a life where we can overcome the frictions and frustrations that stand in our way. Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions. Unless designers of smart technologies take stock of the complexity and richness of the lived human experience—with its gaps, challenges and conflicts—their inventions will be destined for the SmartBin of history." - Evgeny Morozov
"The best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith" - Ernest Becker
"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers." - Ernest Dimnet
"Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt: one's family." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I walk into a kids' store, and it's amazing, the types of instruments - little squeaky things, rattling things, spinning tops." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
"Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any earthly possession. As a United States citizen I believe it is guaranteed in our heaven-inspired Constitution." - Ezra Taft Benson
"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
"Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping." - Faith Baldwin