This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Death is not the merciless that he is made out to be; he is the friend and companion, the teacher, the kindly kinsman, who takes you into his fold and clothes you with the halo of remembrance." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"See yourselves in all; See all in yourselves; that is the road to lasting peace and joy." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The mind can also be used for Liberation from these two shackles, I and Mine.Let it be fixed on God; they will both disappear." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The sun showers light to one and all without any discrimination. Similarly, humans should also engage himself in doing works for the benefit of the society." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses— the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that someday the path may be established more directly?" - Vannevar Bush
"Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world." - Vannevar Bush
"But the accusation and witnesses are produced in the presence of the judge and Power; the accused person makes his defense, and he is immediately acquitted or condemned by the judge; and if he appeals to the triumvirate, on the following day he is acquitted or condemned." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"In contemporary America [mental health] has come to mean conformity to the demands of society. According to the commonsense definition, mental health is the ability to play the game of social living, and to play it well. Conversely, mental illness is the refusal to play, or the inability to play well." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"It is... particularly true of constitutional government that its atmosphere is opinion... It does not remain fixed in any unchanging form, but grows with the growth and is altered with the change of the nation's needs and purposes." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"What must be the knowledge of Him, from whom all created minds have derived both their power of knowledge, and the innumerable objects of their knowledge! What must be the wisdom of Him, from whom all things derive their wisdom!" - Timothy Dwight, fully Timothy Dwight IV
"Upon this principle I imagine it is that some of the finest pieces of antiquity are written in the dialogue manner. Plato and Tully, it should seem, thought truth could never be examined with more advantage than amidst the amicable opposition of well-regulated converse." - William Melmoth, wrote under pseudonym Sir Thomas Fitzosborne
"You know,' he said, sitting back, reflectively, 'it's at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
"And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools." - Hu Shih, or Hú Shì
"When a slave mounts a camel he wants to ride on both humps." - Egyptian Proverbs
"By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"He is only happy when he can maintain himself - mentally and spiritually - at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know where he is located every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"LIZ: What's it like in hell? KETUT: Same like heaven. Universe is a circle, Liss. To up, to down -- all same, at end. LIZ: Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell? KETUT: Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss. LIZ: You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell -- same destinations -- are the same thing anyway? KETUT: Same-same. Same in end, so better be happy on journey." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"There is nothing about which I am more anxious than my country, and for its sake I am willing to die ten deaths, if that be possible." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL
"The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization. In that lies the real tragedy of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May this lesson not be in vain." - Emma Goldman
"A little of what you fancy does you good." - English Proverbs
"Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong." - Eric S. Raymond
"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. EveryÂone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him." - Ernest Becker
"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Ernest Hemingway said: The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"How much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway
"Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within." - Eudora Welty
"What does make a difference is the personal relationships that we create and develop." - Eugene Peterson
"Slyly, banteringly, but also overbearingly, the critic – the one who does not swallow anything whole, who waits until posterity has consecrated it before... howling – is among those who howl their admiration the way they howl their insults: don't be afraid, don't tremble – the beast doesn't have any nails or teeth, or even brain: it is stuffed..." -
"Who then will dare to say I'm weak or timid? No, they'll say I'm loyal as a friend, ruthless as a foe, so much like a hero destined for glory." - Euripedes NULL
"Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence." - Faith Baldwin
"One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table." - Gustave Flaubert
"To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home." - Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland
"A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments." - Hans Hoffman
"One enemy is too many and a hundred friends aren't enough." - Italian Proverbs
"When a wife sins the husband is never innocent." - Italian Proverbs
"If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly
"A time may come soon, said he, when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised. She answered: All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death. What do you fear, lady? he asked. A cage, she said. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"But the only measure that he knows is desire; desire for power and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this we shall put him out of reckoning." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"Do I hope in vain that you have been sent to me for a help in doubt and need?" - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"He led the way in under the huge branches of the trees. Old beyond guessing, they seemed. Great trailing beards of lichen hung from them, blowing and swaying in the breeze. Out of the shadows, the hobbits peeped, gazing back down the slope: little furtive figures that in the dim light looked like elf-children in the deeps of time peering out of the Wild Wood in wonder at their first Dawn." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." -