This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written. I have no name: I am but two days old. What shall I call thee? I happy am, joy is my name. Sweet joy befall thee!" - William Blake
"Let not the reader imagine, however, that the principal interest of this Tale is drawn from so gloomy a topic as famine. The author trusts that the workings of those passions and feelings which usually agitate human life, and constitute the character of those who act in it, will be found to constitute its chief attraction." - William Carleton
"It is continued temperance which sustains the body for the longest period of time, and which most surely preserves it free from sickness." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"When Gott made the womens, he was sorry afterwards for the poor mens--and he made tobaccos to comfort them." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Government spending? I don't know what it's all about. I don't know any more about this thing than an economist does, and, God knows, he doesn't know much." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The nation is prosperous on the whole, but how much prosperity is there in a hole?" - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"The observations in the dark were somehow weird. After the eyes adapted to the darkness, the room did not appear black but grey blue. There were fog like formations and bluish dots and lines of light, violet light phenomena seemed to emanate from the walls as well as from the various objects in the room." - Wilhelm Reich
"A peasant who is unburdened by debt and has an adequate holding is the freest and most independent man among us; neither food problems nor the threat of unemployment need worry him and the subjection to the moods of nature which he exchanges for that of the market and the business cycle, usually ennobles a man instead of embittering him. His life, from whatever angle we view it, is the most satisfying, the richest and the most complete in terms of human needs." - Wilhelm Röepke
"The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend." - Walter Bagehot
"A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state." - Walter Lippmann
"People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives." - Walter Lippmann
"We must assume that the members of a public will not anticipate a problem much before its crisis has become obvious, nor stay with the problem long after its crisis has past. They will not know the antecedent events, will not have seen the issue as it developed, will not have thought out or willed a program, and will not be able to predict the consequences of acting on that program. We must assume as a theoretically fixed premise of popular government that normally men as members of a public will not be well informed, continuously interested, nonpartisan, creative, or executive. We must assume that a public is inexpert in its curiosity, intermittent, and that it discerns only gross distinctions, is slow to be aroused, and quickly diverted; that, since it acts by aligning itself, it personalizes whatever it considers, and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict." - Walter Lippmann
"There is a mountain and a wood between us, where the lone shepherd and late bird have seen us morning and noon and eventide repass. Between us now the mountain and the wood seem standing darker than last year they stood, and say we must not cross--alas! alas!" - Walter Savage Landor
"Women commiserate the brave, and men the beautiful." - Walter Savage Landor
"Innovation by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires 'courageous patience'." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis
"Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into. There's no scarcity of opportunity to making a living at what you love. There is only scarcity of resolve to make it happen." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Avoid giving your children descriptors which will limit them throughout their lives." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"This 'real' nature with whose revelation the Chan Masters are primarily concerned, or the Atman-'I' of the Vedantists, is not the far-off, unreachable will-o'-the-wisp we are apt to imagine, but just the within of which we know the without. It is just the other side of the medal, and it lies wherever our senses and our intellect cease to function." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
"A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular." - Wendell Berry
"A purposeless virtue is a contradiction in terms. Virtue, like harmony, cannot exist alone; a virtue must lead to harmony between one creature and another. To be good for nothing is just that. If a virtue has been thought a virtue long enough, it must be assumed to have practical justification - though the very longevity that proves its practicality may obscure it. That seems to be what happened with the idea of fidelity." - Wendell Berry
"Work now becomes fun. You are motivated to pay the price. You budget your time and money. You study, think, and plan. The more you think about your goals, the more enthusiastic you become. And with enthusiasm your desire turns into a burning desire." - W. Clement Stone, fully William Clement Stone
"In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good." - Walker Percy
"Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place." - Walker Percy
"That singularity is language." - Walker Percy
"Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life...(How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?)" - Walker Percy
"There comes a time when the waltz is no longer a mode of desire, a mode of revealing desire and is empty of shadows. Too many waltzes have ended." - Wallace Stevens
"I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct." - Vivienne Westwood, born Vivienne Isabel Swire
"Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Men appear to prefer to ruin one another's fortunes, and to cut each other's throats over a few miserable villages, than to extend the means of human happiness" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Shun idleness is the rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly – that is the first law of nature." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"The feeling for things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for the picture." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not." - Virginia Satir
"A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. To know the truth--to accept without bitterness-- those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford..." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral — well, he is here. He squats in me." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf