This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The one important thing in life is to see to it that you are never beaten." - André Malraux
"An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide
"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few… My life… lacks this quality of significance and therefore beauty, because there is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on; the time has been filled. There are so few empty pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures – an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
"True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. And if the habit of prayer is seen to be so important for teaching a man to love his fellow men, this is because no answer is given to his prayers. Your love is based on hatred when you wrap yourself up in a certain man or woman on whom you batten as a stock of food laid by and, like dogs snarling at teach other round their trough, you fall to hating anyone who casts even a glance at your repast. you call it love, this selfish appetite. No sooner is love bestowed on you than (even as in your false friendships) you convert this free gift into servitude and bondage and, from the very moment you are loved, you begin to fancy yourself wronged." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"There is no more important element in the formation of a virtuous character than a rightly directed sense of pleasure and dislike; for pleasure and pain are coextensive with life, and they exercise a powerful influence in promoting virtue and happiness in life." - Aristotle NULL
"One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation." - Arthur Ashe
"Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome." - Arthur Ashe
"Man must know what is his real, chief, and foremost object in life - what it is that he most wants in order to be happy…he must find out what, on the whole, his vocation really is - the part he has to play, his general relation to the world. If he maps out important work for himself on great lines, a glance at this miniature plan of his life will more than anything else stimulate, rouse, ennoble, and urge him on to action and keep him from false paths." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their faculty of determining the relative importance of different things. There are many things which it is more desirable to do, a few are essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few essential things are... Let one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being done or left undone." - Author Unknown NULL
"The five most important words: I am proud of you." - Author Unknown NULL
"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of can I drove . . . but the world m ay be different because I was important in the life of a child." - Author Unknown NULL
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."" - Author Unknown NULL
"If to talk to oneself when alone is folly, it must be doubly unwise to listen to oneself in the presence of others... In conversation discretion is more important than eloquence." - Baltasar Gracián
"To know how to refuse is as important as to know how to consent. A gilded No gives more satisfaction than a dry Yes." - Baltasar Gracián
"Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us." - Black Elk, formallly Heȟáka Sápa NULL
"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men." - Black Elk, formallly Heȟáka Sápa NULL
"Everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say." - Brenda Ueland
"Religion consists in believing that everything which happens is extraordinarily important. It can never disappear from the world, precisely for this reason." - Cesare Pavese
"By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory, conversation polishes the wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Ignorance lies at the bottom of all human knowledge, and the deeper we penetrate the nearer we arrive unto it. For what we truly know, or what can we clearly affirm, of any one of those important things upon which all our reasonings must of necessity be built - time and space, life and earth, matter and mind?" - Charles Caleb Colton
"The celebrated Galen said that employment was nature's physician. It is indeed so important to happiness that indolence is justly considered the parent of misery." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The two most important words in managing money and building wealth are “take control.”" - Charles J. Givens
"It is not what life does to you that is important but what you do with what life does to you." - Chinese Proverbs
"The beginning of wisdom is the realization that what is of concern today won't seem important tomorrow." - Chinese Proverbs
"When the most important things in life happen, we quite often do not know at the moment, what is going on." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"Let us not get so busy or live so fast that we can't listen to the music of the meadow or the symphony that glorifies the forest. Some things in the world are far more important than wealth; one of them is the ability to enjoy simple things." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"To think of learning as a preparation for something beyond learning is a defeat of the process. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning." - Daniel Bell
"The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising you will do well in the marketplace." - David Ogilvy
"A man who is so dull that he can learn only be personal experience is too dull to learn anything important by experience." - Don Marquis, fully Donald Robert Perry Marquis
"Everyone receives two educations; the education which he gets from others, and the other which he gives to himself. Of the two the second is the more important" - Edward Gibbon
"Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself." - Edward Gibbon
"The best and most important part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself." - Edward Gibbon
"The truth is more important than the facts." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"In achieving success, backbone is more important than wishbone." - Frank Tyger
"The most important thing to do in solving a problem is to begin." - Frank Tyger
"The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a world all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit - it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"Parentage is a very important profession: but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of children." - George Bernard Shaw
"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure." - Grayson Kirk, fully Grayson Louis Kirk
"The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice. Since the drum is often the only instrument used in our sacred rites, I should perhaps tell you here why it is especially sacred and important to us. It is because the round form of the drum represents the whole universe, and its strong beat is the pulse, the heart, throbbing at the center of the universe. It is as the voice of Wakan-Tanka, and this sound stirs us and helps us to understand the mystery and power of all things." - Nicholas Black Elk, formally Heȟáka Sápa
"The truth [is] that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted in eternity." - Helen Hayes
"The story of love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity." - Helen Hayes
"Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power and is often, in point of fact, useless. Just as a leader doesn't need intelligence, a man in my job doesn't need too much of it either." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger