This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God†merely because it was always there." - Elias Canetti
"Finding Love changes us. Who is out to find Love, matures along the way. The moment to go looking for love, you're going to change from the inside out." - Elif Safak
"She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
"Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, the numbers of the fear'd." - William Shakespeare
"Run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude." - William Shakespeare
"Shall we rest us here, and by relating tales of others' griefs, see if 'twill teach us to forget our own?" - William Shakespeare
"So, when this loose behavior I throw off and pay the debt I never promised, by how much better than my word I am, by so much shall I falsify men's hopes; and, like bright metal on a sullen ground, my reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, shall show more goodly and attract more eyes than that which hath no foil to set it off." - William Shakespeare
"Surely, sir, there's in him stuff that puts him to these ends; for, being not propped by ancestry, whose grace chalks successors their way, nor called upon for high feats done to th' crown, neither allied to eminent assistants, but spiderlike out of his self-drawing web, 'a gives us note, the force of his own merit makes his way, a gift that heaven gives for him, which buys a place next to the king." - William Shakespeare
"Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Devo farmi le ossa. (I need to make my bones)" - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I want to be with God all the time. But I don't want to be a monk, or totally give up worldly pleasures. I guess what i want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"If you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Incest is one of the forms of nastiness in the show. Really, all forms of contemporary evil are there, including violence and exploitation. This is not a cute puppet show for children. Parents might consider bringing kids 16 and up." - Elizabeth Kenny
"Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, the matchless tinting on the royal rose whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, these hold a deeper pathos than our woes, since they leave nothing better to expect." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light, They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake 'till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints... So far I've had no complaints." - Dorothy Parker
"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed." - Emil M. Cioran
"A work of art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament." - Emile Zola
"We dream — it is good we are dreaming — it would hurt us — were we awake —but since it is playing — kill us, and we are playing — shriek — What harm? Men die — externally —it is a truth — of Blood —but we — are dying in Drama —and Drama — is never dead — cautious — We jar each other —and either — open the eyes — lest the Phantasm — prove the Mistake —and the livid Surprise. Cool us to Shafts of Granite —with just an Age — and Name — and perhaps a phrase in Egyptian — it's prudenter — to dream —" - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"The oneself does not rest in peace under its identity, and yet its restlessness is not a dialectical scission, nor a process equalizing difference. Its unity is not just added on to some content of ipseity, like the indefinite article which substantifies even verbs, 'nominalizing' and thematizing them. Here the unity precedes every article and every process; it is somehow itself the content." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
"All you need is love." - English Proverbs
"Two heads are better than one." - English Proverbs
"From our position of being reasonably well off and comfortable, [perhaps] university professors, we tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life… My lesson is to stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track." - Esther Duflo
"Anthropological and historical research also began, in the nineÂteenth century, to put together a picture of the heroic since primiÂtive and ancient times. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive. He had his descendants in the mystery cults of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were cults of death and resurrection. The divine hero of each of these cults was one who had come back from the dead. And as we know today from the research into ancient myths and rituals, Christianity itself was a competitor with the mystery cults and won out—among other reasons—because it, too, featured a healer with supernatural powers who had risen from the dead. These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain "an immunity bath" from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. All historical reliÂgions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want to be reborn, which is a sort of negative magic: claiming not to want what you really want most." - 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
"I distinguish three sorts of signs: 1. Accidental signs, or the objects which particular circumstances have connected with some of our ideas, so as to render the one proper to revive the other. 2. Natural signs, or the cries which nature has established to express the passions of joy, of fear, or of grief, 3. Instituted signs, or those which we have chosen ourselves, and bear only an arbitrary relation to our ideas." - Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
"I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"An eagle, looking for a hard surface on which to break up the turtle that he held in his claws, mistook the bald head of Aeschylus, the author of The Persians, for a rock and let slip the turtle, with fatal accuracy." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"I suppose I don't hear things, but I listen, if you know what I mean. And there is a big difference between hearing and listening. So it's like a conversation, you know. When you speak to someone, it's one on one, and that's exactly how I play." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
"Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way." - Evelyn Glennie, fully Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie
"Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any earthly possession. As a United States citizen I believe it is guaranteed in our heaven-inspired Constitution." - Ezra Taft Benson
"One good yardstick as to whether a person might be the right one for you is this: in her presence, do you think your noblest thoughts, do you aspire to your finest deeds, do you wish you were better than you are?" - Ezra Taft Benson
"Any organization or any individual that targets civilians and kills them for political agenda is a terrorist organization." - Feisal Abdul Rauf
"None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars." - Gustave Flaubert
"I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct." - Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage "There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility." - Hannah Arendt
"Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began." - Hannah Arendt
"Public money is like holy water, every one helps himself to it." - Italian Proverbs
"When one door closes another opens." - Italian Proverbs