This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"An eye like Mars, to threaten or command." - William Shakespeare
"And whatsomever else shall hap tonight, give it an understanding but no tongue, I will requit your love. So, fare your well. My lord, he hath importuned me with love, in honourable fashion. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare
"Ay, marry, uncle; for I always thought It was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith." - William Shakespeare
"Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think, few come within the compass of my curse,— wherein I did not some notorious ill, as kill a man, or else devise his death, ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, accuse some innocent and forswear myself, set deadly enmity between two friends, make poor men's cattle break their necks; set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, and bid the owners quench them with their tears. Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves, and set them upright at their dear friends' doors, even when their sorrows almost were forgot; and on their skins, as on the bark of trees, have with my knife carved in Roman letters, 'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.' Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things as willingly as one would kill a fly, and nothing grieves me heartily indeed but that I cannot do ten thousand more. Titus Andronicus, Act v, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"Brief abstract and record of tedious days." - William Shakespeare
"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection. Henry V, Act iv, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"But say, my lord, it were not regist'red, methinks the truth should live from age to age, as 'twere retailed to all posterity, Even to the general all-ending day. King Richard III, Act iii, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death ... and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next. Henry IV, Part II, Act iii, Scene 2" - William Shakespeare
"By the Lord, thou say'st true, lad--and is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench? PRINCE HENRY: As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle--and is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance? Henry IV, Part I, Act 1" - William Shakespeare
"Coal-black is better than another hue in that it scorns to bear another hue; for all the water in the ocean can never turn the swan's black legs to white, although she lave them hourly in the flood." - William Shakespeare
"He who will warrant his virtue in every possible situation is either an impostor or a fool. " - Claude-Adrien Helvétius
"Reprehension is a kind of middle thing betwixt admonition and correction: it is sharpe admonition, but a milde correction. It is rather to be used because it may be a meanes to prevent strokes and blowes, especially in ingenuous and good natured children. [Blows are] the last remedy which a parent can use: a remedy which may doe good when nothing else can." - William Gouge
"Of all creatures in this visible world, light is the most glorious; of all light, the light of the sun without compare excels the rest." - William Gurnall
"Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do — but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven't done so — and now I'm old. It's too late. It has gone past me — I've lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!" - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
"But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless someday bring about." - William James
"Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." - William James
"Often quoted in forms that correspond only loosely to Hugo's original words, for example: No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation." - William James
"The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one." - William James
"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives." - William James
"The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures." - William James
"Wisdom is learning what to overlook." - William James
"All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness." - William Law
"Devotion signifies a life given, or devoted to God. He therefore is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything, who serves God in everything, who makes all the parts of his common life, parts of piety, by doing everything in the name of God, and under such rules as are conformable to his Glory." - William Law
"God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue." - William Law
"Others again, perhaps truly awakened by the Spirit of God to devote themselves wholly to piety and the service of God, yet making too much haste to have the glory of saints, the elements of fallen nature -- selfishness, envy, pride, and wrath -- could secretly go along with them. For to seek for eminence and significancy in grace is but like seeking for eminence and significancy in nature. And the old man can relish glory and distinction in religion as well as in common life, and will be content to undergo as many labors, pains, and self-denials for the sake of religious, as for the sake of secular glory." - William Law
"Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator." - William Law
"The greatest saint in the world is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice. It is he who is most thankful to God." - William Law
"The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him." - William Law
"The way to be a man of prayer, and be governed by its spirit, is not to get a book full of prayers; but the best help you can have from a book, is to read one full of such truths, instructions, and awakening informations, as force you to see and know who, and what, and where, you are; that God is your all; and that all is misery, but a heart and life devoted to him. This is the best outward prayer book you can have, as it will turn you to an inward book, and spirit of prayer in your heart, which is a continual longing desire of the heart after God, his divine life, and Holy Spirit. When, for the sake of this inward prayer, you retire at any time of the day, never begin till you know and feel, why and wherefore you are going to pray; and let this why and wherefore, form and direct everything that comes from you, whether it be in thought or in word." - William Law
"When a right knowledge of ourselves enters into our minds, it makes as great a change in all our thoughts and apprehensions as when we awake from the wanderings of a dream." - William Law
"A pattern is either right or wrong.... It is no stronger than its weakest point." - William Morris
"I too will go, remembering what I said to you, when any land, the first to which we came seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame, and all seemed won to you: but still I think, perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink, unless by some ill chance I first am slain. But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain." - William Morris
"Love is enough: while ye deemed him a-sleeping, there were signs of his coming and sounds of his feet; his touch it was that would bring you to weeping, when the summer was deepest and music most sweet." - William Morris
"The heart is forever making the head its fool." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"O, judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason." - William Shakespeare
"O, what a world of vile ill-favored faults Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year. The Merry Wives of Windsor (Anne Page at III, iv)" - William Shakespeare
"Oh! never say that 1 was false of heart, Though absence seemed my flame to qualify." - William Shakespeare
"Open your ears, for which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth." - William Shakespeare
"Ouch! In your eyes there is a greater danger than in twenty daggers of your relatives. Look at me sweetly, and is enough to make me invulnerable to hate them." - William Shakespeare
"I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy." - Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
"To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?" - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
"The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music." - Eldridge Cleaver, fully Leroy Eldridge Cleaver
"The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life." - Eleanora Duse, aka Duse
"My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of '-isms' around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist ... I wasn't interested in any religion and the difference between 'religiosity' and 'spirituality' was lost to me. Having spent some time of my childhood with a loving grandmother with many superstitions and beliefs, I had a sense the world was not composed of solely material things and there was more to life than I could see. But the truth is, I wasn't interested in understanding the world. I only wanted to Change it." - Elif Safak
"Sam know why - I said with a smile. - Spiritual development covers our entire consciousness and not its individual countries. Rule number thirty-two: Between you and God should not stand anything. Neither the imams or priests or rabbis or other guardians of morality or religious leadership. Neither spiritual teachers, or even faith. Believe in its values ​​and rules, but not impose them on others never. If you repeatedly break the hearts of the people, whatever religious duty to perform, it is useless. Beware of any idolatry idols because clouding your vision. Let us be your guide and only God. Learn the truth, my friend, but be careful not to become a fetish truths." - Elif Safak
"The misunderstanding here is due to a faulty translation of a German text, in particular the use of the word "mystical." I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic." - Albert Einstein
"Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway, Meeting the check of such another day; And since this business so fair is done, Let us not leave till all our own be won. King Henry the Fourth, Part I (King Henry at V, iv)" - William Shakespeare