This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which if not a virtue, is the groundwork of a virtue." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Your afflictions are not eternal, time will end them, and so shall ye at length see the Lord’s salvation; His love sleepeth not, is still in working for you; His salvation will not tarry nor linger; and suffering for Him is the noblest cross out of heaven. Your Lord hath the choice of ten thousand other crosses, beside this, to exercise you withal; but His wisdom and His love choosed out this for you, beside them all; and take it as a choice one, and make use of it. Let the Lord absolutely have the ordering of your evils and troubles, and put them off you, by recommending your cross and your furnace to Him, who hath skill to melt His own metal, and knoweth well what to do with His furnace." - Samuel Rutherford
"Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be." - Sydney J. Harris
"There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it." - Simone Weil
"To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace." - Simone Weil
"The people of former times... they're dead that's the only thing they have over the living but in their own day they were just as sickening. Picturesqueness: I don't fall for that not for one minute. Stinking filthy dirty washing cabbage-stalks what a pretentious fool you have to be to go into such ecstasies over that! And it's the same thing everywhere all the time whether they're stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it's the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I'd rather stay at home reading a thriller although they've become so dreary nowadays. The telly too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down. But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"In victory one does not understand the horror of war. It is only in the cold chill of defeat that it is brought home to you." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time." - Stephan Jay Gould
"There is no gene for such unambiguous bits of morphology as your left kneecap or your fingernail. […] Hundreds of genes contribute to the building of most body parts and their action is channeled through a kaleidoscopic series of environmental influences: embryonic and postnatal, internal and external. Parts are not translated genes, and selection doesn't even work directly on parts." - Stephan Jay Gould
"We should therefore, with grace and optimism, embrace NOMA's tough-minded demand: Acknowledge the personal character of these human struggles about morals and meanings, and stop looking for definite answers in nature's construction. But many people cannot bear to surrender nature as a transitional object—a baby's warm blanket for our adult comfort. But when we do (for we must), nature can finally emerge in her true form: not as a distorted mirror of our needs, but as our most fascinating companion. Only then can we unite the patches built by our separate magisteria into a beautiful and coherent quilt called wisdom." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Gender named literature simply fun hair." - Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé
"He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them." - Stefan Zweig
"If anyone thinks that Jews can steal into the land of their fathers, he is deceiving either himself or others. Nowhere is the coming of Jews so promptly noted as in the historic home of the Jews, for the very reason that it is the historic home." - Theodor Herzl, born Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl
"To express unafraid and unashamed what one really thinks and feels is one of the great consolations of life." - Theodor Reik
"All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand work, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven." - Thomas Carlyle
"Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous." - Thomas Hobbes
"Is it a fact that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and how is it proved? If a God, he could not die, and as a man he could not redeem." - Thomas Paine
"It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries, and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick among mankind, to expel all ideas of revealed religion, as a dangerous heresy and an impious fraud." - Thomas Paine
"Public credit is suspicion asleep." - Thomas Paine
"There is a mystery in the countenance of some causes, which we have not always present judgment enough to explain. It is distressing to see an enemy advancing into a country, but it is the only place in which we can beat them, and in which we have always beaten them, whenever they made the attempt. The nearer any disease approaches to a crisis, the nearer it is to a cure. Danger and deliverance make their advances together, and it is only the last push, in which one or the other takes the lead." - Thomas Paine
"These people are either too superstitiously religious, or too cowardly for arms; they either cannot or dare not defend ; their property is open to anyone who has the courage to attack them... The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like law, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside. Horrid mischief would ensue were one-half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong." - Thomas Paine
"The self can become a Buddha, a being of perfect wisdom and compassion; and the environment can become a perfect Buddha-land, wherein no one suffers pointlessly and all are there for the happiness of all." - Tibetan Book of the Dead NULL
"Just as life begins at any moment, through an act of realization, so the work. But each beginning, whether of book page, paragraph, sentence or phrase, marks a vital connection, and it is in the vitality, the durability, the timelessness and changelessness of the thoughts and events that I plunge anew each time. Every line and word is vitally connected with my life, my life only, be it in the form of deed, event, fact, thought, emotion, desire, evasion, frustration, dream, revery, vagary, even the unfinished nothings which float listlessly in the brain like the snapped filaments of a spider’s web. There is nothing really vague or tenuous — even the nothingnessses are sharp, tough, definite, durable. Like the spider I return again and again to the task, conscious that the web I am spinning is made of my own substance, that it will never fail me, never run dry." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Every Gag I tell must be based on truth. No matter how much I may exaggerate it, it must have a certain amount of Truth.... Now Rumor travels Faster, but it don't stay put as long as Truth." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null." - Walter Bagehot
"Religion, patriotism, race and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method – they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on." - Walter Lippmann
"And in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else." - Wendell Berry
"I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle." - Wendell Berry
"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Terror is everywhere the beginning of religion." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"I need to become beautiful, become remarkable, become unforgettable, become someone’s everything." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Fame will last maybe two thousand years. And that means two thousand years? (Asked Mr. Ramsay, ironically, gaze at the hedge). Indeed, the means contemplated by the crown of a mountain, vast wilderness of centuries? Even stones that tumble with ice tip will outlast Shakespeare. And his little light will burn without too much shine, a year or two after that will be absorbed more light, and this, in turn, by another and more alive." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"I am what I am, and intend to be it,' for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases. Do not, in your affluence and plenty, you seem to say, pass me by. Stop, you say. Ask me what I suffer." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"You wish to be a poet; you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honestly of your intellect bring you to a halt." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Let the principle of liberty work, but let it work well. In letters, as in society, not etiquette, not anarchy, but laws." - Victor Hugo
"The possible: that window of the dream opening upon reality. Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent. (I.2.iv)" - Victor Hugo
"The Steinway people have asked me to announce that this is a Baldwin piano. (Just before starting a piece)" - Victor Borge, born Børge Rosenbaum
"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life — an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl