This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
"Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer." - Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet
"Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. " - John Barth, fully John Simmons Barth
"A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. " - Joseph Campbell
"Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all." - Joseph Campbell
"The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it's really a manifestation of his character. It's amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets ... The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed." - Joseph Campbell
"We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the hero’s of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had though to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had though to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world." - Joseph Campbell
"The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story." - Mary McCarthy
"Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today." - Max Weber, formally Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
"No man is a hero to his own valet." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts of modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his observations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled "disciple of experience," was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle—practical-minded organizer and surveyor of experience—Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea." - Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce
"A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men." - Nāgārjuna, fully Acharya Nāgārjuna NULL
"Yet in killing the hero and murdering the Word of Life, the Powers necessarily reveal their own corrupt nature and through that revelation, we - as the faithful in these United States - are liberated from America’s idolatry" - Philip Wheaton and Duane Shank
"I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"The hero is the world-man, in whose heart one passion stands for all, the most indulged." - Philip James Bailey
"A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men. " - Plato NULL
"Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day." - Ray Bradbury, fully Ray Douglas Bradbury
"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement." - Raymond Queneau
"Still the race of hero spirits pass the lamp from hand to hand." - Charles Kingsley
"A static hero is a public liability. Progress grows out of motion." - Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
"It isn't everybody who is the hero of his own romance, and when we meet one he is likely to be a fascinating monster" - Robertson Davies
"A Faint Music - Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing." - Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
"When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears." - Robert Hass, aka The Bard of Berkeley
"Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Disease is a physical process that generally begins that equality which death completes." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"To claim that theft or adultery or lying are evil simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity." - Simone Weil
"Even the standard example of ancient nonsense - the debate about angels on pinheads - makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a finite or an infinite number" - Stephan Jay Gould
"A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books." - Thomas Carlyle
"High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge." - Thomas Carlyle
"Says Spinoza: When it seems to us anything in the nature funny or silly, obscure or evil it is because we do not have only little knowledge of things, and we are ignorant system of nature and cohesion as a whole, and we want to hold things according to our thinking and our opinions, even though what he sees as our mind bad or evil is not evil or bad for the system and the laws of nature comprehensive college. But in relation to the laws of our own nature separate. As for the word of good and evil, it does not indicate something positive in itself, because the one thing the same may be simultaneously good or evil, or neither such as music, for example, it is better for Almnaqbd self evil for Alnaúh sad and lost people seemed to be his. It is not good or evil for the Dead" - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Being serious or being a good fellow has got nothing to do with running this country. If the breaks are with you, you could be a laughing hyena and still have a great administration." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The man that found the 726-carat diamond in Africa, received $350,000 for it and wants to buy a farm and silk hat. Well, I can understand a man perhaps being eccentric enough to want to own a silk hat." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field - and keep on doing it." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible." - Washington Irving
"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"The uncritical relations of the dead…" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can." - Walker Percy
"If the stars that move together as one, disband, flying like insects of fire in a cavern of night, pipperoo, pippera, pipperum . . . The rest is rot." - Wallace Stevens
"The honey of heaven may or may not come, but that of earth both comes and goes at once." - Wallace Stevens
"The skreak and skritter of evening gone and grackles gone and sorrows of the sun, the sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon, the yellow moon of words about the nightingale in measureless measures, not a bird for me." - Wallace Stevens
"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Stop giving bothersome people false rewards and they will stop bothering you." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Wherever there was a group of people, and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose brains were all there." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Nature and wisdom are not, but should be, companions." - Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett
"Providence has clearly ordained that the only path fit and salutary for man on earth is the path of persevering fortitude--the unremitting struggle of deliberate self-preparation and humble but active reliance on divine aid." - Elias L. Magoon