This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"From mine enemy let me defend myself; from a pretensed friend, good lord deliver me." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"One of the biggest problems is that women don't want to run for office ... Women who run for office win at the same rate as men. ... I have found that when I ask people to run I have to ask their friends first. They have to get seven or eight requests before they even consider it." - Ella Grasso, born Ella Giovanna Oliva Tambussi
"Thank God, I say, for while I love you so, With that vast love, as passionate as tender, I feel an exultation as I know I have not made you a complete surrender. Here is my body; bruise it, if you will, and break my heart; I have that something still. You cannot grasp it" - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"And if my heart be scarred and burned, the safer, I, for all I learned." - Dorothy Parker
"Hence, goes on the professor, definitions of happiness are interesting. I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: One of the best (we are still on definitions of happiness) was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.' Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe." - Dorothy Parker
"I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending." - Dorothy Parker
"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"I have watched him as only a woman can watch a man upon whom her fate depends, but it has always been in vain." - Emile Gaboriau
"And now we come to the Esterhazy case. Three years have passed, many consciences remain profoundly troubled, become anxious, investigate, and wind up convinced that Dreyfus is innocent." - Emile Zola
"For a moment he [Doctor Pascal] thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild, satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood." - Emile Zola
"The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones." - Emile Zola
"For that mist may break when the sun is high and this soul forget its sorrow and the rose ray of the closing day may promise a brighter ‘morrow." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"I, wretched creature finally had to lower my flag, after a long struggle until dark with gloom and loneliness." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"One time, however, we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness - mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive, and he said mine would be drunk; I said I should fall asleep in his, and he said he could not breathe in mine." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"So he'll never know how much love: not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself, than I own. I do not know that our souls are made, but they are equal, and Linton is as different from mine as a moonbeam is different from lightning, fire or ice." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved." - Emma Goldman
"The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will maker her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women." - Emma Goldman
"There is no need to be unhappy. There is no need to be sad. There is no need to be disappointed, or oppressed, or aggrieved. There is no need for illness or failure or discouragement. There is no necessity for anything but success, good health, prosperity, and an abounding interest and joy in life." - Emmet Fox
"Why not make the following experiment, which will not only be thrillingly interesting, but will certainly teach you more in one day than you could learn from books or lectures in many weeks. Here is what you have to do: For one whole day think, speak, and act exactly as you would if you were absolutely convinced of the truth of the statements that God has all power and infinite intelligence, and that His nature is infinite goodness and love. To think in this manner all day will be the most difficult thing, because it is so subtle. To speak in accordance with these truths will be easier, if you are vigilant. To act in accordance with them will be the easiest part, although it may require much in the way of moral courage." - Emmet Fox
"A word spoken is past recalling." - English Proverbs
"Give credit where credit is due." - English Proverbs
"Give neither advice nor salt, until you are asked for it." - English Proverbs
"It is good fishing in troubled waters." - English Proverbs
"Thursday's child has far to go." - English Proverbs
"Too many cooks spoil the broth." - English Proverbs
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Eric S. Raymond
"It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences." - Eric Temple Bell
"Experiences is just paying attention as time passes." - Erin McKean
"I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"It is ludicrous to read the microwave direction on the boxes of food you buy, as each one will have a disclaimer: THIS WILL VARY WITH YOUR MICROWAVE. Loosely translated, this means, You're on your own, Bernice." - Erma Bombeck, fully Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste
"What we will see is that man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesnÂ’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small mangable pieces as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call character defenses" - Ernest Becker
"Communism is in conflict with human nature." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
"To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
"And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Any form of betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Do you have bad luck with all games? With everything and with women. He smiled again, showing his bad teeth. Truly? –Truly. And what is there to do? -Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas. But now I look forward till when our son will be a lieutenant commander." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water" - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musee du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cezannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"If you have to go away,' she said, 'is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? ..." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway