This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The Schoolboy - I love to rise in a summer morn When the birds sing on every tree; The distant huntsman winds his horn, And the skylark sings with me. O! what sweet company. But to go to school in a summer morn, O! it drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day In sighing and dismay. Ah! then at times I drooping sit, And spend many an anxious hour, Nor in my book can I take delight, Nor sit in learning’s bower, Worn thro’ with the dreary shower. How can the bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring? O! father and mother, if buds are nipp’d And blossoms blown away, And if the tender plants are stripp’d Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and care’s dismay, How shall the summer arise in joy, Or the summer fruits appear? Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy, Or bless the mellowing year, When the blasts of winter appear?" - William Blake
"The Universal Family - Our Wars are wars of life, and wounds of love, With intellectual spears, and long wingèd arrows of thought. Mutual in one another’s love and wrath all renewing, We live as One Man: for, contracting our Infinite senses, We behold multitude; or, expanding, we behold as One, As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ. And He in us, and we in Him, Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of Life, Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other’s trespasses. He is the Good Shepherd, He is the Lord and Master; He is the Shepherd of Albion, He is all in all, In Eden, in the garden of God, and in heavenly Jerusalem. If we have offended, forgive us! take not vengeance against us! " - William Blake
"The lapse of time and rivers is the same, Both speed their journey with a restless stream; The silent pace, with which they steal away, No wealth can bribe, no prayers persuade to stay; Alike irrevocable both when past, And a wide ocean swallows both at last. Though each resemble each in every part, A difference strikes at length the musing heart; Streams never flow in vain; where streams abound, How laughs the land with various plenty crown’d! But time, that should enrich the nobler mind, Neglected, leaves a dreary waste behind. " - William Cowper
"We're beginning to realize that drowsiness or sleep deprivation, fatigue, is beginning to outstrip alcohol as a cause of accidents in transportation, particularly on the highway," - William Dement, fully William Charles Dement
"Love-Contradictions - As rare to heare as seldome to be seene, It cannot be nor never yet hathe bene That fire should burne with perfecte heate and flame Without some matter for to yealde the same. A straunger case yet true by profe I knowe A man in joy that livethe still in woe: A harder happ who hathe his love at lyste Yet lives in love as he all love had miste: Whoe hathe enougehe, yet thinkes he lives wthout, Lackinge no love yet still he standes in doubte. What discontente to live in suche desyre, To have his will yet ever to requyre." - Edward Dyer, fully Sir Edward Dyer
"Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits." - Willard Quine, fully Willard Van Orman Quine
"The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century (around 1900) a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kind of groups, each with the idea of freeing art.. ..The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have." - Willem de Kooning
"The word ‘abstract’ comes from the light tower of the philosophers.. ..one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on ‘Art’... (abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have." - Willem de Kooning
"There is a train track in the history of art that goes way back to Mesopotamia. It skips the whole Orient, The Mayas, and American Indians. Duchamp is on it. Cézanne is on it. Picasso and the Cubists are on it; Giacometti, Piet Mondrian, and so many.. ..I have some feeling about all these people – millions of them – on this enormous track, a way into history. They had a peculiar way of measuring. They seemed to measure with a length similar to their own height.. ..The idea that the thing that the artist is making can come to know for itself, how high it is, how wide and how deep it is, is a historical one, - a traditional one I think. It comes from man’s own image." - Willem de Kooning
"Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?" - William Blake
"Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of orc." - William Blake
"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." - William Blake
"God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!" - William Blake
"He who shall hurt the little wren shall never be beloved by men." - William Blake
"I looked for my soul but my soul I could not see. I looked for my God but my God eluded me. I looked for a friend and then I found all three." - William Blake
"Listen to the fools reproach! It is a kingly title!" - William Blake
"The bat that flits at close of eve has left the brain that won't believe. The owl that calls upon the night speaks the unbeliever's fright." - William Blake
"The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure." - William Blake
"Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast." - William Blake
"But why talk of exaggeration or contradiction? Alas! do not the workings of death and disolarion among us in the present time give them a fearful corroboration, and prove how far the strongest imagery of Fiction is frequently transcended by the terrible realities of Truth?" - William Carleton
"Be not served with kinsmen, or friends, or men entreated to stay; for they expect much, and do little; nor with such as are amorous, for their heads are intoxicated; and keep rather too few, than one too many." - William Cecil, Lord Burghley, 1st Baron Burghley, also Lord William Cecil Burleigh
"I would rather see words out on their own, away from their families and the warehouse of Roget wandering the world where they sometimes fall in love with a completely different word." - William Collins
"But oars alone can ne'er prevail to reach the distant coast the breath of heaven must swell the sail, or all the toil is lost." - William Cowper
"No, freedom has a thousand charms to show that slaves, howe'er contented, never know." - William Cowper
"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade; where rumor of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful or successful war, might never reach me more." - William Cowper
"Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where rumor of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful or successful war, might never reach me more." - William Cowper
"War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene." - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
"A woman who can't talk and a woman who can cook, is simply a woman who has arrived at absolute perfection." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all." Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Give to the masses nothing to do, and they will topple down thrones and cut throats; give them the government here, and they will make pulpits useless, and colleges an impertinence." - Wendell Phillips
"However the development proceeds in detail, the path so far traced by the quantum theory indicates that an understanding of those still unclarified features of atomic physics can only be acquired by foregoing visualization and objectification to an extent greater than that customary hitherto. We have probably no reason to regret this, because the thought of the great epistemological difficulties with which the visual atom concept of earlier physics had to contend gives us the hope that the abstracter atomic physics developing at present will one day fit more harmoniously into the great edifice of Science." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human soul which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative spiritual processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"My friends there was dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the earth. There was dancing again when the first Americans landed on the moon. I'd like to ask you, don't hang up your dancing slippers." - Wernher von Braun, fully Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun
"That [haunting fear of being wrong] is the fate of those who break without knowing clearly that Communism is wrong because something else is right, because to the challenge: God or Man?, they continue to give the answer: Man… They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"Inject laughter into tense situations to save the day; laughter calms tempers and soothes jangled nerves." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"I've found that inspiration is the spark which starts the engine of creativity. Be aware, sensitive, and alert to inspiration, and when it comes put it to work. Keep your spiritual antenna reaching for inspiration, for nothing great was ever accomplished without it." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"The reason progress is slow is that we always expect other men to be the heroes and to live the heroic lives. But we all have hero stuff in us. In our sphere of life we can always live more heroically and triumphantly and grow in heroic stature." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of “nothing attempted, nothing gained” and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Words of encouragement fan the spark of genius into the flame of achievement." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson