This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A life regardful of duty is crowned with an object, directed by a purpose, inspired by an enthusiasm, till the very humblest routine, carried out conscientiously for the sake of God is elevated into moral grandeur; and the very obscurest office, filled conscientiously at the bidding of God, becomes an imperial stage on which all the virtues play. To one who lies thus the insignificant becomes important, the unpleasant delightful, the evanescent eternal." -
"Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
"The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they'd be collecting. Margaret Mead gets cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing some very important things because they're worried and excited and I'm going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we're dealing with something much bigger than we're accustomed to understanding, we're on a very large course indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there's no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller
"When I began to examine just how wealth is created, it seemed to me plain that it arises not from taking, but from giving. People get rich by giving rather than by taking, and this seemed to me to be a very important perception, because the reason for the crisis in capitalism today, it seems to me, is not its practical achievements, but rather the perception of its moral character." - George F Gilder
"What you do is more important that how much you make, and how you feel about it is more important that what you do." - Jerry Gillies
"Timing is everything. It is important to know when as to know how." - Arnold Henry Glasgow
"We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The painter draws with his eyes, not with his hands. Whatever he sees, if he sees it clear, he can put down. The putting of it down requires, perhaps, much more care and labor, but no more muscular agility than it takes for him to write his name. Seeing clearly is the important thing" - Maurice Grosser
"I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. It think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it." - Oscar Hammerstein II, fully Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hamerstein II
"There is one type of feeling which is above all important to foster in childhood. Children have naturally an abundant faculty for wonder and reverence. There are so many books, so many radio and television hours, so many encyclopedias and, alas, so many teachers whose aim is to import knowledge quickly and easily without any element of that faculty which the Greeks said was the beginning of philosophy – Wonder. It is strange that an age which has discovered so many marvels in the universe should be so conspicuously lacking in the sense of wonder." - A. C. Harwood
"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." - Theodore M. Hesburgh, fully Theodore Martin Hesburgh
"Kids today live with awful nightmares: AIDS will wipe us out; the polar ice cap will melt; the nuclear bomb will go off at any minute. Even the best tend to believe we are hopeless to affect matters... Young people are detached from history, the planet and, most important, the future." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
"A rather important contemporary problem: too many unintelligent intellectuals." - Walter Hoving
"All truths cannot be equally important. It is true that a finite whole is greater than any of its parts. It is also true, in the common-sense use of the word, that the New Haven telephone book is smaller than that of Chicago. The first truth is infinitely more fertile and significant than the second." - Robert Hutchins, fully Robert Maynard Hutchins
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"The execution of the laws is more important than the making them." - Thomas Jefferson
"The medical profession tells us that there are four conditions which must be met if we are to have any chance of leading a happy life: physical security, social recognition, adventure, emotional security. In today's highly technical and scientific life, these four considerations become increasingly important, but we should add one vital ingredient: love. Love of our fellow man, love for our work, and the conviction that this love insures the future for all of us." - Archibald Quincy Jones
"All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. Out of these all-uniting depths arises the dream, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral... Death is psychologically as important as birth... Shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing." - Abraham Lincoln
"The least and most imperceptible impressions received in our infancy have consequences very important, and of a long duration. It is with these first impressions, as with a river whose waters we can easily turn, by different canals, in quite opposite courses, so that from the insensible directions the stream receives at its source, it takes different directions, and at last arrives at places far distant from each other; and with the same facility we may, I think, turn the minds of children to what direction we please." - John Locke
"This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself I the things of sense, is precisely what we call Poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different formal object. Whereas metaphysics stands in the line of knowledge and of the contemplation of truth, poetry stands in the line of making and of the delight procured by beauty. The difference is an all-important one, and one that it would be harmful to disregard. Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract intellection; poetry reaches it in the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence... Metaphysics gives chase to essences and definitions, poetry to any flash of existence glittering by the way, and any reflection of an invisible order. Metaphysics isolates mystery in order to know it; poetry, thanks to the balances it constructs, handles and utilizes mystery as an unknown force." - Jacques Maritain
"If you are to find rewarding satisfaction in your work, if your life is to be rich and purposeful and crowned with high achievement, it is important you continue to be a growing person. Education is a continuing process. It does not end with the termination of your schooling. Education continues from the beginning of life to the end of life, and balanced growth throughout one's entire life is important for every individual." - Henry T. Maschal
"Let’s make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with our neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. to sit on the front steps - whether it’s a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and talk to our neighbors is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch make-believe world in not-quite living color." - Harvey Milk
"Three things we should keep in mind [in conversation]: first, that we speak in the presence of people as vain as ourselves, whose vanity suffers in proportion as ours is satisfied; second, that there are few truths important enough to justify paining and reproving others for not knowing them; finally, that any man who monopolizes the conversation is a fool or would be fortunate if he were one." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it." - Robert Motherwell
"Solitude is important to man. It is necessary to his achievement of peace and contentment. It is a well into which he dips for refreshment for his soul. It is his laboratory in which he distills the pure essence of worth from the raw materials of his experiences. It is his refuge when the very foundations of his life are being shaken by disastrous events." - Margaret E. Mulac
"It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has." - William Osler, fully Sir William Osler
"Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood." - Bons (Leonidovich) Pasternak
"Process is more important than product. We must learn to pay more attention to the "how" instead of the "what" we are doing." - Paul Pearsall
"All children wear the sign: 'I want to be important NOW.' Many of our juvenile delinquency problems arise because nobody reads the sign." - Dan Pursuit
"The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure the book may have after it is written... the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product." -
"There must be some supreme, universal design. Each of us comes to life and stays in the world for predestined period. Some leave forever, sometimes without a trace; others stay for a long time, both in life and in memory. We remain longest - we make a difference - when we manage to act not for ourselves but for others. It is possible to create good and evil. The greatest and most important thing a person can do is to understand that where good exists, evil also resides; what’s more, one must strive to stay on the side of righteousness, doing one’s best to promote good in the world. Only you can make this choice. You alone will be held responsible - by other people, by your progeny and by history." - Eduard Shevardnadze
"Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny, he thinks he is in the world for something important and it gives him drive and confidence." - Benjamin Spock, fully Benjamin McLane Spock
"Happiness has many roots, but none more important than security." - Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr.
"It is important not to confuse stability with force, or the greatness of a thing with its duration." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?... There is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life." -
"Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our emotions." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"Most important, novelty and creativity are unrecognizable unless they emerge from order." - Ross A. Webber
"The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God." - Daniel Webster
"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." - Simone Weil
"The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes." - Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss