This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political station. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility. He sacrifices not only his own interest but that of his neighbor, and he betrays the interest of his country." - Noah Webster, fully Noah Webster, Jr.
"Attitudes are more important than facts." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Emotional tranquillity, refusal to worry, the attitude of happiness, zest for life, keeping control, having grit and courage - these are important factors in physical health and long life." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Life is too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"It is important to differentiate between your needs and your wants. Your needs are few, while your wants can be limitless. In order to find freedom and Bliss, minister only to your needs. Stop creating limitless wants and pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of false happiness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity." - Paul Goodman
"Our relentless desire for things ultimately devours the land while silencing stories that may be important for us to hear. In losing our connection to the land, we also lose an important source of information about how we might live differently. We are left with fewer and fewer sources of meaning for ourselves." - Peter Forbes
"A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts." - Plato NULL
"The beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken." - Plato NULL
"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato NULL
"The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected." - Plato NULL
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words." - Rachel Naomi Remen
"The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he form whom meanness withholds some important benefit." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Ideas define our place in the universe, our relations with other people; ideas determine what is important and what is not important, what is fair and what is not fair, what is worth believing and what is not worth believing. Ideas give life meaning." - Robert C. Solomon
"Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"A character standard is far more important than even a gold standard. The success of all economic systems is still dependent upon both righteous leaders and righteous people. In the last analysis, our national future depends upon our national character - that is, whether it is spiritually or materially minded." - Roger Babson, fully Roger Ward Babson
"For growth in virtue the important thing is to be silent and work." - Saint John of the Cross, born Juan de Yepes Álvarez NULL
"The life of the creative person is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult... in the end working is good because it is the last refuge of the person who wants to be amused." - Saul Steinberg, fully Saul Erik Steinberg
"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars." - Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
"The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written." - William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
"How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most." - Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important... they do not mean to do harm... they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"You talk about Marshall McLuhan’s idea of TV connecting us all in one “global village.” I believe mass communication has helped make us all closer today than we’ve ever been. And I believe that the gathering and dissemination of worthwhile information to all the peoples of the world is the most important tool we have for achieving the end of realizing that our planet is the address for paradise." - Ted Turner, fully Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III
"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body's changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life." - Thomas Moore
"Suppleness is an extremely important quality of soul... When you find tolerance in yourself for the competing demands of the soul, life becomes more complicated, but also more interesting. An example might be the contradictory needs of solitude and social life." - Thomas Moore
"The ending of a relationship is as mysterious as its beginning... We tend to look for rational causes and to blame one of the parties for committing the crime of ending. Fate and its important relationship to the soul are forgotten... The soul in a relationship is not only contained in each individual, it is also contained in the relationship itself." - Thomas Moore
"Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity." - Thomas Moore
"To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged in whatever we are doing, and it is the very heart of soul making. From some grand overview of life, it may seem that only the big events are ultimately important. But to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance." - Thomas Moore
"The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good, are the two most important aims of philosophy." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it." - William Hazlitt
"Sometimes almost more important than sexual love or money to live on is, I think, somebody who can accompany you in your mind's experiences." - William Hazlitt
"A teacher who tends to lower the self-esteem and confidence of his students should either change this tendency or change professions. One of the most important lessons an educator can convey to students is that they have inherent worth and should strive to utilize their potential." - Zelig Pliskin
"The realization that everyone perceives things differently, whether greatly or slightly, is a very important principle for dealing effectively with others. The greater your understanding of someone else’s perception of reality, the greater your ability to communicate effectively with him." - Zelig Pliskin
"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals." - Zig Ziglar, born Hilary Hinton Ziglar
"I believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings. If it has not often been realized hitherto, that is chiefly because husband and wife have regarded themselves as each other’s policeman. If marriage is to achieve its possibilities, husbands and wives must learn to understand that whatever the law may say, in their private lives they must be free." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The thing to do when you're impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. It is always on our left, as at arm’s length. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you have the feeling that your companion is there watching you. How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us? Death is the only wise advice that we have. When we feel that everything is going wrong, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong. That nothing really matters outside its touch. Ask death's advice and drop the cursed pettiness that belongs to men that live their lives as if death will never tap them... It doesn't matter what the decision is. Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions we make in the face of our inevitable death." - Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda
"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. " -
"The important point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it - exactly and completely" - Dainin Katagiri, fully Jikai Dainin Katagiri, aka Hojo-san Katagiri
"In a Nutshell: Six Ways to Make People Like You – Principle 1: Become genuinely interested in other people. Principle 2: Smile. Principle 3: Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Principle 4: Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. Principle 5: Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Principle 6: Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely. " - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you." - Daniel Amen
"Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company's existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being." - David Packard
"If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It's very important to be aware of them every time they come up." - Deepak Chopra
"One of the best ways to properly evaluate and adapt to the many environmental stresses of life is to simply view them as normal. The adversity and failures in our lives, if adapted to and viewed as normal corrective feedback to use to get back on target, serve to develop in us an immunity against anxiety, depression, and the adverse responses to stress. Instead of tackling the most important priorities that would make us successful and effective in life, we prefer the path of least resistance and do things simply that will relieve our tension, such as shuffling papers and majoring in minors." - Denis E. Waitley