This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches in the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skillfully constructed, could do; nay, which brings to view even the throne of God, and pierces that nebulous distance where are those eternal verities in which true life consists." - Henry Ward Beecher
"A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation. A politician looks for the success of his party; a statesman for that of his country. The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift." - James Freeman Clarke
"Religion is life, philosophy is thought; religion looks up, friendship looks in. We need both thought and life, and we need that the two shall be in harmony." - James Freeman Clarke
"By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, but most by lewd and lavish act of sin, let in defilement to the inward parts, the soul grows clotted by contagion, imbodies, and imbrues, till she quite loose the divine property of her first being." - John Milton
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"It is very important if a man is wise or only looks it." - Latin Proverbs
"The silence of a stupid man looks like wisdom." - Latin Proverbs
"The Masters say that the soul has two faces. The higher one always sees God, the lower one looks downward and informs the senses. The higher one is the summit of the soul, it gazes into eternity. It knows nothing about time and body." - Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
"Religion is a candle inside a multi-colored lantern. Everyone looks through a particular color, but the candle is always there." - Mohammed Naguib
"Success at anything requires two vital ingredients: enthusiasm and perseverance. Both can be helped by the broad view that looks beyond temporary difficulties and disappointments to a great goal... Enthusiasm is the priceless quality that makes everything different." - Norman Vincent Peale
"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"The metaphysician looks at truth from within to without. That is why they clash. But realized souls who understand science as well as metaphysics find no difference at all. They see the parallelism between science and truth because they see the whole picture." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"I look on that man as happy, who, when there is a question of success, looks into his work for a reply." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has earned anything rightly until he knows that every day is doomsday. Today is a king in disguise. Today always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the face of a uniform experience that all good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank todays. Let us not be deceived, let us unmask the king as he passes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Intellect... is a critical, creative, and contemplative side of minds. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole." - Richard Hofstadter
"No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"All other passions condescend at times to accept the inexorable logic of facts; but jealousy looks facts straight in the face, and ignores them utterly, and says she knows a great deal better than they tell her." - Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
"When a man is in the plains, he sees the lowly grass and the mighty pine tree and says how big is the tree and how small is the grass? But when he ascends the mountain and looks from its high peak to the plain below, the mighty pine tree and the lowly grass blend into one indistinct mass of green. So in the sight of the worldly man there are differences of rank and position, but when the divine sight is opened, there remains no distinction of high and low." -
"A judge sins if he looks not to the merits in the accused." - Zohar or The Zohar, literally "Splendor or Radiance" NULL
"Differences of opinion give me but little concern; but it a real pleasure to be brought into communication with anyone who is in earnest, and who really looks to God's will as his standard of right and wrong, and judges of actions according to their greater or lesser conformity." - Thomas Arnold
"Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself." - Thomas Carlyle
"The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone." - William Butler Yeats
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." - William Shakespeare
"A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye. " - Carolyn Wells
"He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze
"Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. So you leave everything fresh, natural, vivid, and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade, and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness." - Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
"Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"A telescope, a telephone, or a typewriter is a complex mechanism serving a particular function. Obviously, its manufacturer had a purpose in mind, and the machine was designed and built in order to serve that purpose. An eye, an ear, or a hand is also a complex mechanism serving a particular function. It, too, looks as if it had been made for a purpose. This appearance of purposefulness is pervading in nature, in the general structure of animals and plants, in the mechanisms of their various organs, and in the give and take of their relationships with each other. Accounting for this apparent purposefulness is a basic problem for any system of philosophy or of science. " - George Gaylord Simpson
"Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day. " - Grandma Moses, By name of Anna Mary Robertson Moses
"Institutions can never conserve without betraying the movements from which they proceed. The institution is static, whereas its parent movement has been dynamic; it confines men within its limits, while the movement had liberated them from the bondage of institutions; it looks to the past, [although] the movement had pointed forward. Though in content the institution resembles the dynamic epoch whence it proceeded, in spirit it is like the [state] before the revolution. So the Christian church, after the early period, often seemed more closely related in attitude to the Jewish synagogue and the Roman state than to the age of Christ and his apostles; its creed was often more like a system of philosophy than like the living gospel." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr
"God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different." - Harold Kushner, fully Harold Samuel Kushner
"All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know." - Henry Spencer Moore
"To mere reason the world always looks two-dimensional. " - Herman Hesse
"Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state." - James Joyce
"Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. " - James Russell Lowell
"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all are agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better-looking than he had imagined." - James Russell Lowell
"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction, complacency, or smugness. Self-satisfaction breeds futility and despair. All that is creative in man stems from a seed of endless discontent. New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. The aim is the maintenance and fanning of a discontent with our aspirations and achievements, the maintenance and fanning of a craving that knows no satisfaction. Man’s true fulfillment depends upon communion with that which transcends him." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens." - John Homer Miller
"There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion; it is this, indeed, which gives a value to all the rest, which sets them at work in their proper times and places, and turns them to the advantage of the person who is possessed of them. Without it, learning is pedantry, and wit impertinence ; virtue itself looks like weakness; the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice." - Joseph Addison
"I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside. " - Joseph Brodsky
"Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little,--diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God's mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness." - Joseph Hall
"The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it." - Jules de Goncourt, fully Jules Huot de Goncourt