This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In the dimension of dhyan (meditation) you have let the activities of the mind come to an end" - Vimala Thakar
"Self-education begins by watching how we are using the energy and learning how not to waste it through." - Vimala Thakar
"Those of us who have dedicated our lives to social action have considered our personal morality and ethics, our motives and habits, to be private territory. We not only want our personal motivations and habits cut off from public view, but from our own recognition as well. But in truth, the inner life is not a private or personal thing; it’s very much a social issue. The mind is a result of collective human effort. There is not your mind and my mind; it’s a human mind. It’s a collective human mind, organized and standardized through centuries. The values, the norms, the criteria are patterns of behavior organized by collective groups. There is nothing personal or private about them. We may close the doors to our rooms and feel that nobody knows our thoughts, but what we do in so-called privacy affects the life around us. If we spend our days victimized by negative energies and negative thoughts, if we yield to depression, melancholia, and bitterness, these energies pollute the atmosphere. Where then is privacy? We need to learn, as a social responsibility, to look at the mind as something that has been created collectively and to recognize that our individual expressions are expressions of the human mind." - Vimala Thakar
"The proper stuff of fiction does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honor and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Youth, youth- something savage- something pedantic. For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"I departed and I sought mountains with my father on my back." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for." - Vicki Robin
"I am Bourbon as a matter of honor, royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?" - Victor Hugo
"For he knew how to do a little of everything--all badly." - Victor Hugo
"Navigation is the opposite of war. Navigation civilizes barbarism, war barbarizes civilization." - Victor Hugo
"Progress is the life-style of man. The general life of the human race is called Progress, and so is its collective march. Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on its horizon. It has its nights of slumber; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker to see the human spirit lost in shadow, and to grope in the darkness without being able to awake sleeping progress." - Victor Hugo
"The cause of all this young man’s crimes was his desire to be well dressed. The first grisette who had said to him, you are handsome, had spattered a stain of darkness into his heart and had made a Cain of this Abel." - Victor Hugo
"I discover that hardly a week passes that someone does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"The hope of the world lies in the rehabilitation of the living human being, not just the body but also the soul." - Václav Havel
"This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique ... something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard." - Václav Havel
"The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice." - Vannevar Bush
"The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only at the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected." - Vannevar Bush
"And when there is no wind a beast draws along a huge cart, which is a grand sight." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that has in it more history within 100 years than all the world had in 4,000 years before! of the wonderful inventions of printing and guns, and the use of the magnet, and how it all comes of Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the Scorpion!" - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Wars might never occur, nevertheless they are exercised in military tactics and in hunting, lest perchance they should become effeminate and unprepared for any emergency." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin." - Tryon Edwards
"If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"Again and again mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me, and, taking my hand, have not only shed tears upon it, but they have added, `God bless you, Mr. President! Why should they pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas. I consented to their sons' being put in the most difficult part of the battle line, where death was certain...Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me? Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe, and rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species." - William Godwin
"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door." - William James
"Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err." - William James
"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in." - William James
"We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can." - William James
"Folk say, a wizard to a northern king at Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show, that through one window men beheld the spring, and through another saw the summer glow, and through a third the fruited vines a-row, while still, unheard, but in its wonted way, piped the drear wind of that December day. So with this Earthly Paradise it is, if ye will read aright, and pardon me, who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss midmost the beating of the steely sea, where tossed about all hearts of men must be; whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay, not the poor singer of an empty day." - William Morris
"The mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy; at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch chain; and if he is allowed any real precedence for this, it is almost a moral swindle - a way of obtaining goods under false pretences." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"It is those who have compassion for all life who will best safeguard the life of man. Those who become aroused only when man is endangered become aroused too late. We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life and have it habitable for ourselves. It is the conservationist who is concerned with the welfare of all the land and life of the country, who, in the end, will do most to maintain the world as a fit place for human existence." - Edwin Way Teale
"If diversity is what is a central value in every selective university in the United States, then it ought to be seen as a compelling interest by the Supreme Court." - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"It is good policy to strike while the iron is hot; it is still better to adopt Cromwell's procedure, and make the iron hot by striking. The masterspirit who can rule the storm is great, but he is much greater who can both raise and rule it." - Elias L. Magoon
"No nation now sets forth to despoil another upon the avowed ground that it desires the spoils." - Elihu Root
"There's a reason they call God a presence-because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Men live a moral life, either from regard to the Diving Being, or from regard to the opinion of the people in the world; and when a moral life is practised out of regard to the Divine Being, it is a spiritual life. Both appear alike in their outward form; but in their inward, they are completely different. The one saves a man, but the other does not; for he that leads a moral life out of regard to the Divine Being is led by him, but he who does so from regard to the opinion of people in the world is led by himself." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"The human race is the seminary of heaven, will appear from a subsequent article, in which it will be shown, that Heaven and Hell are from the human race, and that therefore the human race is the seminary of heaven." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"There is a place for analysis, but it is apt to be quite fatal in prayer and meditation. Do not dissect the love of God, but feel it. Do not dissect divine intelligence, but realize it. Do not wonder how God can possibly solve this problem, but just watch Him do it in His own way—and He will if you will give Him a chance. You know that God is Love. So go ahead on that, and do not get theoretical about it." - Emmet Fox
"But when Strife was grown great in the limbs of the god and sprang forth to claim his prerogatives, in the fullness of the alternate time set for them by the mighty oath,….for all the limbs of the god in turn quaked." - Empedocles NULL
"The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does." - Ernest Shurtleff Holmes
"When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken." - Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
"Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell of the East which lures me in the books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on — in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon?" - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal