This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community." - Albert Einstein
"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life." - Albert Einstein
"The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it." - Debbi Fields
"Many of our culture's most important achievements in the arts, science, and technology were made by people who had breakthrough insights in dreams, visions, intuitive flashbacks, and altered states of consciousness. And yet our society generally discounts such experiences, sometimes even treating them as grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness." - Richard Heinberg
"What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers." - Matina Horner, fully Matina Souretis Horner
"Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage." - Benito Juárez , born Benito Pablo Juárez García
"Character education is no panacea. By itself, it will not repair disintegrating schools, neighborhoods, or families; dry up the drug trade; or create jobs. But it can be an important part of efforts to invest in our children's development and well-being." - Elizabeth Kiss (pronounced "quiche")
"The most important decision we’ll make in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita isn’t whether to rebuild New Orleans. It’s how to tackle global warming." - Nicholas D. Kristof, fully Nicholas Donabet Kristof
"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing." - Abraham Lincoln
"Your time or my time might be for hire, but time itself is not. Hence time is our most precious asset-and how we decide to use our time is the most important decision we can make." - Lou Marinoff
"In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." - Max DePree, alternatively De Pree or Depree
"Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important." - Korean Proverbs
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather, the judgment that something else is more important than fear." - Ambrose Redmoon, pen name for James Neil Hollingsworth
"It is important to recognize that our achievements not only speak well for us, they speak well for those persons and forces, seen, unseen, and unnoticed, that have been active in our lives." - Anne Wilson Schaef
"Do-so is more important than "say-so."" - Pete Seeger, born Peter Seeger
"The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence." - Robert J. Shiller, fully Robert James "Bob" Shiller
"We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human being." - Ben Stein, fully Benjamin Jeremy "Ben" Stein
"From Apollonian law to Dionysian spirit, prose to poetry, left cortical hemisphere to right, the line between the two domains [or cultures] can be easily crossed back and forth, but no one knows how to translate the tongue of one into that of the other. Should we even try? I believe so, and for the best of reasons: the goal is both important and attainable." -
"The existential concept of guilt adds something even more important than the broadening of the scope of "accountability." Most simply put: one is guilty not only through transgressions against another or against some moral or social code, but one may be guilty of transgression against oneself." - Irvin David Yalom
"If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than to listen to it." - Aaron Copland
"The love of power comes from a lack of the most important power, that of living a life of eternity with every creature." - A. D. Gordon, fully Aaron David Gordon
"I learned three important things in college - to use a library, to memorize quickly and visually, to drop asleep at any time given a horizontal surface for fifteen minutes. What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule." - Agnes George de Mille
"No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently." - Agnes George de Mille
"There are an infinite number of ways to serve. Each of the ways is equally important... No matter what our personal path to God, service is always a necessary step on the path." - Alan Cohen
"The reality of thoughts and the power they have to create and to change the world brings with it a supremely important realization: We can bless and we can heal." - Alan Cohen
"In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation." - Alexis Carrel
"Each individual thinks himself the center of the world. Nothing seems more important to us than our own existence." - Alexis Carrel
"Do not forget the most important fact that neither heredity nor environment is a determining factor. Both are giving only the frame and the influences which are answered by the individual in regard to his styled creative power." - Alfred Adler
"We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited." - Alfred Adler
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur. . . . Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead