This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue)." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Phenomena unfold on their own appropriate scales of space and time and may be invisible in our myopic world of dimensions assessed by comparison with human height and times metered by human lifespans. So much of accumulating importance at earthly scales […] is invisible by the measuring rod of a human life. So much that matters to particles in the microscopic world of molecules […] either averages out to stability at our scale or simply stands below our limits of perception." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into traits, explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating for the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed." - Stephan Jay Gould
"The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with at stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)" - Stephan Jay Gould
"Traditional explanations for stasis and abrupt appearance had paid an awful price in sacrificing the possibility of empirics for the satisfaction of harmony. Eventually we (primarily Niles) recognized that the standard theory of speciation—Ernst Mayr's allopatric or peripatric scheme—would not, in fact, yield insensibly graded fossil sequences when extrapolated into geological time, but would produce just what we see: geologically unresolvable appearance followed by stasis. For if species almost always arise in small populations isolated at the periphery of parental ranges, and in a period of time slow by the scale of our lives but effectively instantaneous in the geological world of millions, then the workings of speciation should be recorded in the fossil record as stasis and abrupt appearance. The literal record was not a hopelessly and imperfect fraction of truly insensible gradation within large populations but an accurate reflection of the actual process identified by evolutionists as the chief motor of biological change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium was, in its initial formulation, little more than this insight adumbrated." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four." - Stephen Hawking
"The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological—technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century." - Stephen Hawking
"Quoting son, Noah Levine: Once you see what the heart really needs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to live or die; the work is always the same." - Stephen Levine
"For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, hermit-like." - Stefan Zweig
"I, who unfortunately for me I always had a passionate curiosity for the things of the mind ..." - Stefan Zweig
"It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the Sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture." - Thomas Berry
"Love he comes and Love he tarries just as fate or fancy carries; longest stays, when sorest chidden; laughs and flies, when press'd and bidden." - Thomas Campbell
"Each institution has demonstrated very distinctive characteristics to their situations. The NCAA hopefully will recognize how we are different from the other institutions that they've dealt with so far and will give us a favorable review in a timely fashion." - Thomas Hardy
"The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow." - Thomas Hardy
"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
"I own it to be my opinion, that good will arise from the destruction of our credit. I see nothing else which can restrain our disposition to luxury, and to the change of those manners which alone can preserve republican government. As it is impossible to prevent credit, the best way would be to cure its ill effects by giving an instantaneous recovery to the creditor. This would be reducing purchases on credit to purchases for ready money. A man would then see a prison painted on everything he wished, but had not ready money to pay for." - Thomas Jefferson
"And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter—just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"I got to a state where phrases like the Good, the True, and the Beautiful filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones." - Thomas Merton
"One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drains every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed." - Thomas Merton
"To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair." - Thomas Merton
"We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God." - Thomas Merton
"The short answer is that a valid instruction derived from experience can help me if it guides me to my own experiential discovery . . . I believe the best use of technical knowledge is to communicate a hint toward a desired destination. The hint can be delivered verbally or demonstrated in action, but it is best seen as an approximation of a desired goal to be discovered by paying attention . . . and feelings one’s way toward what works for that individual." - Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
"In an age marked by dissolution, liquidation seems to me a virtue, nay a moral imperative. … I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Why has there been no new international style in 50 years? Because the new ideas, the new needs are not yet clear. (Hence, we content ourselves with variations + refinements on Art Deco and, for refreshment + fusions, parodistic — ‘pop’ — revivals of older styles.)" - Susan Sontag
"In point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"I lay very little stress either upon asking or giving advice. Generally speaking, they who ask advice know what they wish to do, and remain firm to their intentions. A man may allow himself to be enlightened on various points, even upon matters of expediency and duty; but, after all, he must determine his course of action, for himself." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"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
"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, tenderly will I use you curling grass, it may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, it may be if I had known them I would have loved them, it may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, and here you are the mothers' laps." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say." - Walter Lippmann
"Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command." - Walter Savage Landor
"Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
"As a group, lemmings have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories." - Washington Irving
"Such heaped up platters of cakes of various and almost indescribable kinds, known only to experienced Dutch housewives! There was the doughty doughnut, the tender oly koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes. And then there were apple pies, and peach pies, and pumpkin pies; besides slices of ham and smoked beef; and moreover delectable dishes of preserved plums, and peaches, and pears, and quinces; not to mention broiled shad and roasted chickens; together with bowls of milk and cream, all mingled higgledy-piggledy, pretty much as I have enumerated them, with the motherly teapot sending up its clouds of vapor from the midst-- Heaven bless the mark!" - Washington Irving
"Virtually all fights revolve around the absurd thought, ‘If only you were more like me, then I wouldn’t have to be upset.’" - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Many people profess unconditional love, and yet below they are still working the mystery of the ego and attempting to compensate inadequacy and powerlessness. Crises are often the first opportunity of coming into wholeness – they are not what we think they are at the level of loss and humiliation. You think there’s nothing left, just a devastation, our eyes are so close to the problem that we can’t see the overview – to me, that’s why we pay attention to dreams, since the dream will reveal the dynamic if we can bring ourselves into accord with it, and we can let go of what we think we need, to move to “What does Life seek from us at this point, and how do we put ourselves into accord with that larger process?" - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function." - Walker Percy
"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down posh lost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over-concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"I felt my life needed a shake-up." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs that are able to contain immortal images, spirals of thought, new worlds with live people who talk, cry and laugh. We accept it with such simplicity that somehow, by the very act of acceptance and insensitive routinely undo the work of all time, the story of the gradual development of poetical description and construction of the hominid Browning, the caveman to Keats. What would happen if we awaken one day, all of us, and we discovered that we were totally unable to read? I want you to dazzle not only with what they read, but with the miracle that something is likely to be read." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov