This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Forgiveness is not a condoning of the unskillful act which has caused injury, but a touching of the actor with mercy and loving kindness." - Stephen Levine
"And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must succeed. That's what the world was made for. That's what he was made for. That was what he would have to do." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
"Last night you lay a-sleeping? No! The room was thirty-five below; the sheets and blankets turned to snow. He'd got in: Dirty Dinky." - Theodore Roethke
"Television deprives children of their imaginations." - Theodore Rubin, fully Theodore Isaac Rubin
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform." - Theodore H. White, fully Theodore Harold White
"The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"When you feel anger arising, remember to return to your breathing and follow it. The other person may see that you are practicing, and she may even apologize." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Your home is the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and they are all available in the present moment. You don't have to go to India to practice the Three Refuges. You can be right here to practice taking refuge. Your practice will determine if the feeling of being at home in yourself is deep or not." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Earth as we know it came into being through its four great components: land, water, air, and life, all interacting in the light and energy of the sun. Although there was a sequence in the formation of the land sphere, the atmosphere, the water sphere, and the life sphere, these have so interacted with one another in the shaping of the Earth that we must somehow think of these as all present to one another and interacting from the beginning." - Thomas Berry
"For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth." - Thomas Berry
"The child awakens to a universe. The mind of the child to a world of meaning. Imagination to a world of beauty. Emotions to a world of intimacy. It takes a universe to make a child both in outer form and inner spirit. It takes a universe to educate a child. A universe to fulfill a child." - Thomas Berry
"There is no inner world without the outer world." - Thomas Berry
"For man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer." - Thomas Carlyle
"Give me a man who sings at his work." - Thomas Carlyle
"In no time whatever can small critics entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a certain altogether peculiar collar reverence for Great Men--genuine admiration, loyalty, adora-tion." - Thomas Carlyle
"Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous." - Thomas Hobbes
"Competition of riches, honour, command, or other power, inclineth to contention, enmity, and war: because the way of one competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repel the other." - Thomas Hobbes
"In Nature, Profit is the measure of Right." - Thomas Hobbes
"Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind, as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he." - Thomas Hobbes
"They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion" - Thomas Hobbes
"In our own native land, in defense of the freedom that is our birthright and which we ever enjoyed till the late violation of it. For the protection of our property, acquired solely by the honest industry of our fore-fathers and ourselves, against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before." - Thomas Jefferson
"In the environment, every victory is temporary, every defeat permanent." - Thomas Jefferson
"The best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same kind of soil. The former article is of the first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country. The latter, never useful." - Thomas Jefferson
"You have not been mistaken in supposing my views and feeling to be in favor of the abolition of war. Of my disposition to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself, the world has had proofs, and more, perhaps, than it has approved. I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair." - Thomas Jefferson
"To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"I am concerned… with the “good” people, the right-thinking people, who stick to principle all right except where it conflicts with the chance to make a fast buck. It seems to me that there are very dangerous ambiguities about our democracy in its actual present condition. I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and systematic irresponsibility… Some Americans are not too far from the law of the jungle. If our affluent society ever breaks down, what are we going to have left?" - Thomas Merton
"I detest pornography. I utterly loathe writing that seeks to work on the passions and to exploit them, instead of releasing them in a healthy form : laughter … The utterly sick and subhuman reduction of ‘thought’ to nothingness: to something that appears to be sensual but is not even that." - Thomas Merton
"It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: In our impatience we do away with him altogether." - Thomas Merton
"Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair." - Thomas Merton
"The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration." - Thomas Merton
"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!" - Thomas Merton
"This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction... The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something... O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen." - Thomas Merton
"We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of the search shall be the nature of the America that we created." - Waldo Frank
"Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation." - Susan Sontag
"They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed." - William Cowper
"A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"There is a great tendency all over the country now to be high-brow. More people should work for their dinner instead of dressing for it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Ecosystem agriculturalists will take advantage of huge chunks of what works. They will be taking advantage of the natural integrities of ecosystems worked out over the millennia." - Wes Jackson
"I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, whispering I love you, before long I die, I have travel'd a long way merely to look on you to touch you, for I could not die till I once look'd on you, for I fear'd I might afterward lose you. Now we have met, we have look'd, we are safe, return in peace to the ocean my love, I too am part of that ocean my love, we are not so much separated, behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect! But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us, as for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever; be not impatient--a little space--know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land, every day at sundown for your dear sake my love." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"In every particular state of the world, those nations which are strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best." - Walter Bagehot
"The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it." - Walter Bagehot
"Winston Churchill's eloquence is the man himself, and the secret of his fascination is his magnanimity." - Walter Lippmann
"Lack of seeking implies that one does not cherish one's purpose with determination." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an