This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Sing louder around to the bells' cheerful sound, while our sports shall be seen on the echoing green." - William Blake
"The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man." - William Blake
"Hearses coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality, were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible works of pestilence and famine which were going on the earth beneath it." - William Carleton
"Let not the reader imagine, however, that the principal interest of this Tale is drawn from so gloomy a topic as famine. The author trusts that the workings of those passions and feelings which usually agitate human life, and constitute the character of those who act in it, will be found to constitute its chief attraction." - William Carleton
"Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books." - William Cowper
"Not rural sights alone, but rural sounds exhilarate the spirits, and restore the tone of languid nature. Mighty winds, that sweep the skirts of some far-spreading wood of ancient growth, make music not unlike the dash of ocean on his winding shore, and lull the spirit while they fill the mind." - William Cowper
"Most people and actors appearing on the stage have some writer to write their material. Congress is good enough for me. They have been writing my material for years." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The main thing about being a hero is to know when to die." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"Walking uplifts the spirit. Breathe out the poisons of tension, stress, and worry; breathe in the power of God. Send forth little silent prayers of goodwill toward those you meet. Walk with a sense of being a part of a vast universe. Consider the thousands of miles of earth beneath your feet; think of the limitless expanse of space above your head. Walk in awe, wonder, and humility. Walk at all times of day. In the early morning when the world is just waking up. Late at night under the stars. Along a busy city street at noontime." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain." - Wilfred Trotter, fully Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
"I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"It’s no secret that we we're sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"Our sympathies are with the families during this difficult time. In regard to the reports, we believe they speak for themselves." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The difference in winning and losing is most often... not quitting." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"To captivate our varied and worldwide audience of all ages, the nature and treatment of the fairy tale, the legend, the myth have to be elementary, simple. Good and evil, the antagonists of all great drama in some guise, must be believably personalized. The moral ideals common to all humanity must be upheld. The victories must not be too easy. Strife to test valor is still and will always be the basic ingredient of the animated tale, as of all screen entertainments." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"We're not trying to entertain the critics ... I'll take my chances with the public." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"A great city is that which has the greatest men and women, if it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings, stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, with many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle - and from this bush in the dooryard, with delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, a sprig with its flower I break." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer; when the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; when I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick; till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, look’d up in perfect silence at the stars." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Great men always pay deference to greater." - Walter Savage Landor
"The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell." - Walter Savage Landor
"The heart that has once been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever." - Walter Savage Landor
"We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented." - Walter Savage Landor
"We cannot conquer fate and necessity, yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could." - Walter Savage Landor
"Its massive height near the City of Heaven joins a thousand mountains to the corner of the sea. Clouds, when I look back, close behind me, mists, when I enter them, are gone. A central peak divides the wilds and weather into many valleys... Needing a place to spend the night, I call to a wood-cutter over the river." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng
"Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was - a woman." - Washington Irving
"That inexhaustible good-nature which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather." - Washington Irving
"The paternal hearth, that rallying place of the affections." - Washington Irving
"It's not what is available or unavailable that determines your level of success and happiness; it's what you convince yourself it true." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"How should we like it were stars to burn with a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"In poetry you have a form looking for a subject and a subject looking for a form. When they come together successfully you have a poem." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. [in memory of Sigmund Freud]" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"Vast tribes of savages, who had always been idolaters, who were perfectly incapable, from their low state of civilization, of forming any but anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, or of concentrating their attention steadily on any invisible object, and who for the most part were converted not by individual persuasion but by the commands of their chiefs, embraced Christianity in such multitudes that their habits of mind soon became the dominating habits of the Church. From this time the tendency to idolatry was irresistible. The old images were worshipped under new names, and one of the most prominent aspects of the Apostolical teaching was in practice ignored." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension--and that is the sign-user himself...The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally." - Walker Percy
"We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away." - Walker Percy
"Some people and I am one of them hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov