This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity form the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”" - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"In the beginning there was information. The word came later. the transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind." - Fred Dretske, fully Frederick "Fred" Irwin Dretske
"Men marry to make an end; women to make a beginning." - Alexis Dupuy
"The power of little things has so often been noted that we accept it as an axiom, and yet fail to see, in each beginning, the possibility of great events." - Tyron Edwards
"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." - Henry Ford
"Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have is a second edition to correct some faults of the first." - Benjamin Franklin
"For many children, the start of formal musical instruction marks the beginning of the end of musical development. The atomistic focus in most musical instruction - the individual pitch, its name, its notation -- and the measure-by-measure method of instruction and analysis run counter to the holistic way most children have come to think of, react to, and live with music." - Howard Gardner, fully Howard Earl Gardner
"The thinking world is beginning to realize that all the dangers that besiege you can be met with the greatest weapon you possess; your thought and your emotions." - Walter M. Germain
"The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"There is one type of feeling which is above all important to foster in childhood. Children have naturally an abundant faculty for wonder and reverence. There are so many books, so many radio and television hours, so many encyclopedias and, alas, so many teachers whose aim is to import knowledge quickly and easily without any element of that faculty which the Greeks said was the beginning of philosophy – Wonder. It is strange that an age which has discovered so many marvels in the universe should be so conspicuously lacking in the sense of wonder." - A. C. Harwood
"Music is for the betterment and enrichment of the individual, just as education and reading are. When people come together to play music as they do to play bridge, civilization will have taken its longest stride forward since the beginning of time. Music is something to live with always, and children should be taught to regard it as a close and inalienable friend." - Jascha Heifetz
"Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal." - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
"Ninety-nine percent of all activity is economic and practical, and only one percent is political; but the one percent is the beginning of the whole sequence." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, born Vladimir Jabotinsky
"As a part of God, that which we are eternally had no beginning nor does it have any end. It is really enough for us to know - that life persists, that it is indeed eternal - and then to get on with the life that we are experiencing in the here and now. We are always greater than what we express, and the purpose of our life is to express more and more of what we eternally are. We do that by living each moment of life as a joyful song of exultation to God... We view each event in our journey as stages of an unfolding spiritual process." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
"Belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that will guarantee the success of any venture." - William James
"The wild is a place to be tamed. It is an arrogant designation of priority - make the world over for humans. Americans, seeing landscape from the beginning as real estate, are scrupulous about dealing in it, and in prosperous areas all over the country, a fierce moral judgment falls on “waste” places, scrubland, even the vacant lots in developments, where the ragweed’s got a good hold. For God’s sake, do something with it! everybody says." - Janet Kauffman
"There is no advancement to him who stands trembling because he cannot see the end from the beginning." - E. J. Klemme
"Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything." - Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire NULL
"To be born is to begin to die; the end is linked to the beginning." - Manilius, fully Marcus Manilius NULL
"If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual." - Henry T. Maschal
"Let us never endure the loss of the greatest of all human blessings, liberty, the beginning and fountain of all happiness!" - Moses Mendelssohn
"When we consider absolute reality, there is no end, no beginning; emptiness is the same as fulfillness, just seen from a different perspective. We say that this coffee cup is empty; but empty means filled with space, filled with possibilities, ready for anything: milk, water, tea wine. Every moment of time, every point in space, is completely empty, completely open for what wants to come. That is why it can be filled." - Stephen Mitchell
"When does God create heaven and earth? In the beginning. And when is the beginning? At every moment. Dying to past and future, we are born into the creative Now. Beginner's mind is the mind of God." - Stephen Mitchell
"The Cosmos has had no beginning... and this is warrant for its continued existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of all the change must itself be changeless." - Plotinus NULL
"Justice is that which is most primitive in the human soul, most fundamental in society, most sacred among ideas, and what the masses demand today with most ardor. It is the essence of religions and at the same time the form of reason, the secret object of faith, and the beginning, middle and end of knowledge. What can be imagined more universal, more strong, more complete than justice?" - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Since the beginning of civilization we have explained our existence in terms of what we could observe... Maybe we will discover that the only true reality is a state of mind, shaped by the information we can process and contexts in which we see it. Maybe the Supreme Being we call God can best be appreciated as the power of ultimate understanding. Maybe our destination has always been to learn and grow as we approach the light of ultimate understanding. Only the context of our ability to process information changes." - Frank Scully
"Maybe we’re just one experiment... Maybe we’re part of the creator’s great caldron, boiling with a wealth of phenomena that the most learned physicians and physicists are just beginning to figure out... I think it’s impossible to think our being here is the result of chance. I think we’re part of a master plan known only to the Creator." - Cory SerVaas
"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better." - Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy
"We can look upon a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as the road which leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment, and by journeying over it we can only gain that which in itself it offers to us." -
"In times when the passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, one should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Today the conservation movement finds itself turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it... In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indian knew from the beginning; that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall
"Every beginning is a consequence - every beginning ends something." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"Better it is toward the right conduct of life, to consider what will be the end of a thing, than what is the beginning of it: for what promises fair at first may prove ill, and what seems at first a disadvantage, may prove very advantageous." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"Did you guess any thing lived only its moment? The world does not so exist, no parts palpable or impalpable so exist, no consummation exists without being from some long previous consummation, and that from some other, without the farthest conceivable one coming a bit nearer the beginning than any." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own." - Charles Williams
"You tell us that baptism is absolutely necessary to go to heaven. If there were a man so good that he had never offended God, and if he died without baptism, would he go to hell, never having given any offense to God? If he goes to hell, then God must not love all good people, since He throws one into the fire. You teach us that God existed before the creation of heaven and earth. If He did, where did He live, since there was neither heaven nor earth? You say that the angels were created n the beginning of the world, and that those who disobeyed were cast into hell. How can that be so, since you say the angels sinned before earth’s creation, and hell is in the depths of the earth? You declare that those who go to hell do not come out of it, and yet you relate stories of the damned who have appeared in the world - how is that to be understood. Ah, how I would like to kill devils, since they do so much harm! But if they are made like men and some are even among men, do they still feel the fire of hell? Why is it that they do not repent for having offended God? If they did repent, would not God be merciful to them? If Our Lord has suffered for all sinners, why do not they receive pardon from him? You say that the virgin, mother of Jesus Christ, is not God, and that she has never offended God. You also say that her Son has redeemed all men, and atoned for all; but if she has done nothing wrong, her son could not redeem her nor atone for her." - Young “Savage” Seminarians NULL
"The stationary condition is the beginning of the end." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"The mother said, “This is a better day than the last, for my children have learned fortitude in the face of hardness. Yesterday I gave them courage. Today I have given them strength... This is the best day of all, for I have shown my children God... I have reached the end of my journey. And now I know that the end is better than the beginning, for my children can walk alone, and their children after them.” And the children said, “You will always walk with us, Mother, even when you have gone through the gates.”" - Temple Bailey, born Irene Temple Bailey
"All genuine philosophy is, in the end if not consciously in the beginning, a quest for God." - André Bremond
"Change occurs when something new starts or something old stops, and it takes place at a particular point in time. But transition cannot be localized in time that way, since it is the gradual . . . process through which individuals and groups reorient themselves. Change often starts with a new beginning, but transition must start with an ending--with people letting go of old attitudes and behaviors." - William Bridges, fully Sir William Throsby Bridges