This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In love all the contradiction of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time. Only love is motion and rest in one. Our heart ever changes its place till it finds love, and then it has its rest... Bondage and liberation are not antagonistic in love. for love is most free and at the same time most bound." -
"The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it." - Diana Vreeland, born Diana Dalziel
"Not from successful love alone, nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; but as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, as gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, as softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, as days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days!" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Produce great men, the rest follows." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Nothing comes harder than original thought. Even the most gifted scientist spends only a tiny fraction of his waking hours doing it, probably less than one tenth of one percent. the rest of the time his mind hugs the coast of the known, reworking old information, adding lesser data, giving reluctant attention to the ideas of others (what use can I make of them?), warming lazily to the memory of successful experiments, and looking for a problem - always looking for a problem, something that can be accomplished, that will lead somewhere, anywhere." - E. O. Wilson, fully Edward Osborne "E.O." Wilson
"A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out." - Walter Winchell
"You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother’s hair? I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother." - Wovoka, aka Jack Wilson NULL
"Cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on a rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy." - Edward Young
"There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it's rather hard to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us." - Alain-Fournier, Pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier NULL
"Happy are those whose life is today and only today. Sad are the prophets and those others whose eyes are open to the past. Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays nor their tomorrows filled with despair: they rest in peace." - Ayi Kwei Armah
"No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine." - A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer
"The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage!" - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"The soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is indeed rest, if you like, but as though at a station, where the engine is still under steam, the onward movement becoming a vibration on one spot, until it is time to race forward again." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" - Louise Bogan
"No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity. It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and to speak out that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it." - Walter Brueggemann
"The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Leave every church Independent; not Independent from brotherly Counsel, God forbid it that we should refuse that; but when it comes to power, that one Church shall have the power over the rest, then look for a Beast." - John Cotton
"If you rest in the stillness like a broken gong, you have already reached heaven, for anger has left you." - Dhammapada NULL
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…. in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?" -
"Every time you give a bit of yourself and you plant a little seed of Future Happiness. All the rest of your life these seeds will keep springing up unexpectedly along your path. When you need a friend to give you a lift in some situation, likely as not along will come a person for whom you did something thoughtful when you were a youngster. Taking up giving-away as a hobby while you are young, and you will live a happy life. What is more, because you do so many wonderful thoughtful things on impulse, you will develop a lively and interesting personality - gracious, friendly, likable." - David Dunn
"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." - Albert Einstein
"The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force." - Albert Einstein
"I believe that, for the rest of the world, contemporary America is an almost symbolic concentration of all the best and the worst of our civilization. On the one hand, there are its profound commitment to enhancing civil liberty and to maintaining the strength of its democratic institutions, and the fantastic developments in science and technology which have contributed so much to our well-being; on the other, there is the blind worship of perpetual economic growth and consumption, regardless of their destructive impact on the environment, or how subject they are to the dictates of materialism and consumerism, or how they, through the omnipresence of television and advertising, promote uniformity, and banality instead of a respect for human uniqueness." - Václav Havel
"We are living at a time when humankind can face whatever threatens it only if we, by which I mean each of us, manage to revive, with new energy and new ethos, a sense of responsibility for the rest of the world." - Václav Havel
"To see the world as being ruled by a divine love which sets infinite value upon each individual and includes all men in its scope, and yet to live as though the world were a realm of chance in which each must fight for his own interests against the rest, argues a very dim and wavering vision of God’s rule." - John Hick, fully John Harwood Hick
"What is hateful to you don’t do to another. This is the whole Torah [i.e., Law]; the rest is commentary." - Hillel NULL
"Rites [li] rest on three bases: heaven and earth, which are the source of all life; the ancestors, who are the source of the human race; [and] sovereigns and teachers, who are the source of government... Should any of the three be missing, either there would be no people or people would be without peace. Hence rites are to serve Heaven on high and earth below, and to honor the ancestors and elevate the sovereigns and teachers... Who holds to the rites is never confused in the midst of multifarious change; who deviates therefrom is lost. Rites - are they not the culmination of culture?" - Hsun-Tzu NULL
"The divine in the creation is only adequately represented when the whole of the time-process is gathered up into its final meaning and purpose, when, in fact, the mode of becoming is united with the mode of being. This I conceive to be the eternal world – not a world of immobility in contrast with a world of change, but a world in which the antinomy of becoming and being, of motion and rest, is transcended." - William Ralph Inge
"Get but that “peace of God which passeth understanding,” and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest." - William James
"We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account." - William James
"This is the reason why we have no ease of heart or soul, for we are seeking our rest in trivial things which cannot satisfy... He [alone] is true rest... Nothing less will satisfy us." - Julian of Norwich NULL
"Always repenting of wrongs done will never bring my heart to rest." - Chi His K’ang
"Passive resistance is a sport for gentleman (and ladies) – just like the pursuit of war, a heroic enterprise for the ruling classes but a grievous burden for the rest." - Kenneth Kaunda, fully Kenneth David Kaunda
"The peace of God is peace within ourselves. The unrest of human life comes largely from our being torn asunder by contending impulses. Conscience pulls this way, passion that. Desire says, “Do this”; reason, judgment, prudence say “It is your peril if you do!” One desire fights against another. And so the man is rent asunder. There must be the harmonizing of all the being if there is to be real rest of spirit." - Alexander Maclaren
"Hillel said: What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man; that is the essence of the Torah, the rest is commentary: go and learn." - Mishnah or The Mishnah NULL
"It turns out that our notions of what a “self” is and how it might feel fulfilled have no more objective status than most of the rest of reality. It seems we make ourselves up as we go alone." - Maureen O’Hara
"To every soul there openeth a high way and a low; the high soul climbs the high way, the low soul gropes the low. And in between, on these misty flats, the rest drift to and fro. To every soul there openeth a high way and a low; and every man decideth which way his soul will go." - John Oxenham, pen name for Wiliam Arthur Dunkerley
"Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I am enjoying it… That’s the way the rest of my life would need to be lived." - Randy Pausch, fully Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch
"Each man’s nature in one way and another is vitally associated with the life and well-being of every other individual in the world and what affects one must in some degree affect the rest of humanity." - Baird T. Spalding
"The unity of God, the freedom of man, and the creation of the world. Upon these three pillars, and upon them alone, rests and must rest every revealed religion." - S. L. Steinheim, Solomon Ludwig (Levy) Steinheim