This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The internal instrument is threefold. The external organs, which exhibit objects to these three, are tenfold. The external organs function in the present, and the internal instrument at all times." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"Without dispositions (bhavas) there would be no subtle body (linga), and without the subtle body there would be no cessation of dispositions. Evolution, therefore, proceeds in two ways, the elemental and the intellectual." - Ishvarakrishna, aka Iśvarakṛṣṇa NULL
"If husband and wife have the habit of staying together, never leaving one another, and following each other around within the limited space of their own rooms, then they will lust after and take liberties with one another. From such action improper language will arise between the two This kind of discussion may lead co licentiousness. But of licentiousness will be born a heart of disrespect to the husband. Such a result comes from not knowing that one should stay in one's proper place." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
"Secretary of War Stanton used to get out of patience with Lincoln because he was all the time pardoning men who ought to be shot." - Elihu Root
"If you ask for the purpose or goal of society as a whole or of an individual taken as a whole the question loses its meaning. This is, of course, even more so if you ask the purpose or meaning of nature in general. For in those cases it seems quite arbitrary if not unreasonable to assume somebody whose desires are connected with the happenings." - Albert Einstein
"In responding to this poignant cry for help, Einstein offered no easy solace, and this very fact must have heartened the student and lightened the lonely burden of his doubts. Here is Einstein's response. It was written in English and sent from Princeton on 3 December 1950, within days of receiving the letter:" - Albert Einstein
"The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of weakness and confusion." - Albert Einstein
"Scarce can I speak, my choler is so great. Oh! I could hew up rocks, and fight with flint." - William Shakespeare
"See here, my friends and loving countrymen: this token serveth for a flag of truce betwixt ourselves and all our followers." - William Shakespeare
"Since I was man, such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never remember to have heard. Man's nature cannot carry th' affliction nor the fear." - William Shakespeare
"So, of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom." - William Shakespeare
"A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite..." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"This instinct for totality, the counterpart of the feeling, gnawing and rankling, of dissatisfaction, is the germ of all religion. But man answers the craving need of a totality and a prospect into the future according to his historical conditions. Therefore all religions are genuine rings. None of them is a counterfeit, and none of them owns exclusively the truth and the whole truth." - Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
"Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine -- If he love with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him -- Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse -- It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not?" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread." - Emma Goldman
"Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun." - Emma Goldman
"Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell, reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment." - Emma Goldman
"The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime. The wholesale mechanisation of modern life has increased uniformity a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its most concentrated dullness is public opinion. Few have the courage to stand out against it. He who refuses to submit is at once labeled queer,different,and decried as a disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life." - Emma Goldman
"To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character." - Emma Goldman
"When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood — a truly free society." - Emma Goldman
"You should never "put up" with anything. You should never be willing to accept less than Health, Harmony, and Happiness. These things are your Divine Right as the sons and daughters of God, and it is only a bad habit, unconscious, as a rule, that causes you to be satisfied with less. In the depths of his being man always feels intuitively that there is a way out of his difficulties if only he can find it, and his natural instincts all point in the same direction." - Emmet Fox
"I cannot believe that God would make to a sinner in his wants and his woes the tender of a relief which did not exist, or which he did not wish him to embrace; I cannot believe that God would command his creatures to embrace a provision which had never been made for them, or sanction by the peril of one’s everlasting interests a commandment which he never meant should be obeyed, and which itself precluded the possibility of obedience." - Erskine Mason
"Spite of Lavater, faces are oftentimes great lies. They are the paper money of society, for which, on demand, there frequently proves to be no gold in the human coffer." - F. G. Trafford, pseudonymn of Charlotte Eliza Lawson, née Charlotte Cowan, Mrs. J.H. Riddell
"In other words, it is not so much a question as to whether we are able to cure a patient, whether we can or not, but whether we should or not." - Ernest Becker
"Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates." - Ernest Becker
"The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count." - Ernest Becker
"One learns to itch where one can scratch." - Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith
"The feeling of revolt will grow stronger every day among the peoples subjected to various degrees of exploitation, and they will take up arms to gain by force the rights which reason alone has not won them." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents." - Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
"Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?" - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own "system" and accuses every other "system" as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others." - Erving Goffman
"Conditions are admittedly such that we can always manage to make doing each concrete individual case without the two different aspects leading to different expectations as to the result of certain experiments. We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case. Will we have to be permanently satisfied with this...? On principle, yes. On principle, there is nothing new in the postulate that in the end exact science should aim at nothing more than the description of what can really be observed. The question is only whether from now on we shall have to refrain from tying description to a clear hypothesis about the real nature of the world. There are many who wish to pronounce such abdication even today. But I believe that this means making things a little too easy for oneself." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"The reason for desires, goals, for finding those decisions or points of focus, is because they are the life-giving things of the Universe. Without objects of attention, or objects of desire, Life-Force does not come through any of us." - Ester and Jerry Hicks
"It may be telling the truth sometimes the smartest formula for communicating erroneous information." - Etel Adnan
"Why should those eminently rational beings, the scientists, deliberately prefer to the simple notions of design, or purposiveness, in nature, the arbitrary notions of blind force, chance, emergence, sudden variation, and similar ones? Simply because they much prefer a complete absence of intelligibility to the presence of a nonscientific intelligibility." - Étienne Gilson, fully Étienne Henry Gilson
"The American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earthÂ…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the readerÂ’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them." - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"She seemed to say "Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?" That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty."" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"What is adolescence without trash?" - Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
"It was from him [Joseph Smith] that I learned that the wife of my bosom might be secured to me for time and all eternity; and that the refined sympathies and affections which endeared us to each other emanated from the fountain of divine eternal love. It was from him that I learned that we might cultivate these affections, and grow and increase in the same to all eternityÂ… 'It was from him that I learned the true dignity and destiny of a son of God, clothed with an eternal priesthood, as the patriarch and sovereign of his [family]. It was from him that I learned that the highest dignity of womanhood was, to stand as a queen and priestess to her husband. We qualify for these blessings when we go with a companion to the house of the Lord and receive the sealing ordinances that bind the family unit beyond the grave. These blessings are received in no other way, for as the Lord has decreed, 'Except ye abide my law ye cannot attain to this glory', which glory is an eternal." - Ezra Taft Benson
"The great task of life is to learn the will of the Lord and then do it." - Ezra Taft Benson
"Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it." - Felix Adler
"It is the moral element contained in it that alone gives value and dignity to a religion, and only in so far as its teachings serve to stimulate and purify our moral aspirations does it deserve to retain its ascendency over mankind." - Felix Adler
"There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and restated. In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, "though the heavens should fall." A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across a raging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet." - Felix Adler
"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly