This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!" - William James
"Devotion signifies a life given, or devoted to God. He therefore is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life, parts of piety, by doing everything in the name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to his Glory." - William Law
"The world belongs to the enthusiast who keeps cool." - William (Morley Punshon) McFee
"All nature is a vast symbolism; every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"Non-perception may be because of extreme distance or proximity, impairment of the senses, mental unsteadiness, subtlety, interposition, suppression, blending with what is similar, and other causes." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"One of the most essential ingredients of great statesmanship is trust, and especially expressing trust." - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL
"Another rule that the pursuit of love. No one seeks behind only love and simmer During his trip, what The trip begins search for love even begin to change from home and abroad" - Elif Safak
"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals, or would directly sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. I cannot do this in spite of the fact that mechanistic causality has, to a certain extent, been placed in doubt by modern science." - Albert Einstein
"Oh, Lord - responsibility. That word worked on me until I worked on it, until I looked at it carefully and broke it down into the two words that make its true definition: the ability to respond." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen. She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it." - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
"All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation." - Emil M. Cioran
"For the man who has got in the nasty habit of unmasking appearances, event and misunderstanding are synonyms. To make for the essential is to throw up the game, to admit one is defeated." - Emil M. Cioran
"Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic." - Emil M. Cioran
"I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness." - Emil M. Cioran
"Denise came to the foot of the Saint-Lazare, where a train of Cherbourg had landed with his two brothers station after a night on the hard seat of a third-class carriage. She held him by the hand Pepe and John followed her every three broken the trip, bewildered and lost in the middle of the vast Paris, nose up on houses, asking every corner of the street Michodière in which their uncle Baudu remained. But as she finally uncorked the Gaillon up, the girl stopped short of surprise." - Emile Zola
"It was always the same; other people gave up loving before she did. They got spoilt, or else they went away; in any case, they were partly to blame. Why did it happen so? She herself never changed; when she loved anyone, it was for life. She could not understand desertion; it was something so huge, so monstrous that the notion of it made her little heart break." - Emile Zola
"I wonder if it hurts to live, and if they have to try, and whether, could they choose between, they would not rather die." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest." - 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
"Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"You are a dog in the manger, Cathy, and desire no one to be loved but yourself!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be." - Emma Goldman
"All enjoyment is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It is not just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a first abnegation." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"But anarchy is not disorder as opposed to order, as the eclipse of themes is not, as js said, a return to a diffuse 'field of consciousness' prior to attention. Disorder is but another order, and what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"In summary, the existence of an unperceived material thing can only be its capability of being perceived. This capability is not an empty possibility in the sense that everything that is not contradictory is possible; rather, it is a possibility which belongs to the very essence of consciousness." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the dawning of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge etc.) of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said. Eyen an empirical, individual being is broached across the ideality of logos. Subjectivity qua consciousness can thus be interpreted as the articulation of an ontological event, as one of the mysterious ways in which its 'act of being' is deployed." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"What exists for us, what we consider as existing is not a reality hidden behind phenomena that appear as images or signs of this reality. The world of phenomena it-self makes up the being of our concrete life." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"This Indwelling Power, the Inner Light, or Spiritual Idea, is spoken of in the Bible as a child, and throughout the Scriptures the child symbolically always stands for this. Bible symbolism has its own beautiful logic, and just as the soul is always spoken of as a woman, so this, the Spiritual Idea that is born to the soul, is described as a child." - Emmet Fox
"Decentralization affected every aspect of life. Medical services were dispersed; the claim is that instead of massive hospitals in the city centers, besieged by huge lines of waiting patients, there were small hospitals and clinics everywhere, and a neighborhood-oriented system of medical aides. Schools were broken up and organized on a novel teacher-controlled basis. Agricultural, fishery, and forestry enterprised were also reorganized and decentralized. Large factory-farms were broken up through a strict enforcement of irrigation acreage regulations which had been ignored before Independence, and commune and extended-family farms were encouraged." - Ernest Callenbach
"In many of these languages there are numerals only for one, two, and three: no Australian language counts beyond four. Very many wild tribes can count no further than ten or twenty, whereas some very clever dogs have been made to count up to forty and even beyond sixty." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"The science of comparative anatomy. Its task is, by comparing the fully-developed bodily forms in the various groups of animals, to learn the general laws of organisation according to which the body is constructed; at the same time, it has to determine the affinities of the various groups by critical appreciation of the degrees of difference between them." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"We see that man entirely resembles the higher mammals, and most of all the apes, in embryonic development as well as in anatomic structure. And if we seek to understand this ontogenetic agreement in the light of the biogenetic law, we find that it proves clearly and necessarily the descent of man from a series of other mammals, and proximately from the primates." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"An expansion of man's ability to bring forth secondary products is useless unless preceded by an expansion of his ability to win primary products from the earth; for man is not a producer but only a converter, and for every job of conversion he needs primary products." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"On the basis of experience and conscious thought small ideas may easily be dislodged, but when it comes to bigger, more universal or more subtle ideas it may not be so easy to change them. Indeed, it is often difficult to become aware of them, as they are the instruments and not the results of our thinking—just as you can see what is outside you, but cannot easily see that with which you see, the eye itself." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities—because they pay for the infrastructure—and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"Speaking on the near skepticism of the study of the history of philosophy:" - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"The true reason why this universe appears to some scientists as mysterious is that, mistaking existential, that is, metaphysical, questions for scientific ones, they ask science to answer them. Naturally, they get no answers. Then they are puzzled, and they say that the universe is mysterious." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"We can recognize the absolute transcendence of revelation by the curious fact of the philosophical and theological multiple meanings of the texts of scripture. When St. Thomas was looking for a sed contra for his question on the existence of God, he does not seem to have found a text in which Yahweh says in so many words, “I exist.” So he had recourse to the statement of Exodus: Ego sum qui sum. But that statement is a reply to the question Moses put to God: When the people ask me who has sent me to them, what shall I answer?" - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"We do not need to project out own ideas into the economy of nature; they belong there in their own right. Our own ideas are in the economy of nature because we ourselves are in it. Any and every one of the things which a man does intelligently is done with a purpose and to a certain end which is the final cause why he does itÂ… Through man, who is part and parcel of nature, purposiveness most certainly is part and parcel of nature. In what sense is it arbitrary, knowing from within that where there is organization there always is a purpose, to conclude that there is a purpose wherever there is organization?" - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! he exclaimed. The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise." - Eugen Herrigel
"The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when solutions donÂ’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility. We need pruning. Cut back to our roots, we learn this psalm and discover the quietness of the weaned child, the tranquility of maturing trust. It is such a minute psalm that many have overlooked it, but for all its brevity and lack of pretense, it is essential. For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development." - Eugene Peterson
"The War that began in heaven is not yet over. The conflict continues on the battlefield of mortality. And one of Lucifer’s primary strategies has been to restrict our agency through the power of earthly governments... We must appreciate that we live in one of history’s most exceptional moments — in a nation and a time of unprecedented freedom. Freedom as we know it has been experienced by perhaps less than one percent of the human family." - Ezra Taft Benson
"Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do." - Felipe Fernández-Armesto