This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet, breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. “A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it.”" - Stephen Leacock, fully Stephen Butler Leacock
"I would define boastfulness to be the pretension to good which the boaster does not possess." - Theophrastus NULL
"Diversity is the magic. It is the first manifestation, the first beginning of the differentiation of a thing and of simple identity. The greater the diversity, the greater the perfection." - Thomas Berry
"For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries. Our story not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future." - Thomas Berry
"For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth." - Thomas Berry
"There is a spiritual capacity in carbon as there is a carbon component functioning in our highest spiritual experience. If some scientists consider that all this is merely a material process, then what they call matter, I call mind, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Possibly it is a question of terminology, since scientists too on occasion use terms that express awe and mystery. Most often, perhaps, they use the expression that some of the natural forms they encounter seem to be "telling them something"." - Thomas Berry
"Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth." - Thomas Berry
"Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods." - Thomas Carlyle
"It is the first of all problems for a man (or woman) to find out what kind of work he (or she) is to do in this universe." - Thomas Carlyle
"Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown." - Thomas Hardy
"We ought not to schismatize on either men or measures. Principles alone can justify that." - Thomas Jefferson
"How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess." - Thomas Merton
"How impious is the title of "sacred majesty" applied to a worm, who, in the midst of his splendor, is crumbling into dust!" - Thomas Paine
"The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up." - Thomas Paine
"The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous; but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale." - Thomas Paine
"The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance." - Thomas Paine
"At the foot of the south mountain I sow beans; The weeds tangle them, the bean shoots are weak. I rise early and scratch in the wilderness. Under the moonlight I return with my hoe on my shoulder. The footpath between the furrows so narrow, the grasses so long That my clothes are moistened with dew. Why should I care when my clothes are wet? I only hope to make myself a hermit." - Ch'ien, fully T'ao Chien or Tao Qian, aka Tao Yuan-ming NULL
"The true alternative to the outworn magic of primitive peoples is not the modern magic of persons disciplined in the applied sciences or the “new thought.” It is no solution of the ultimate moral and intellectual problem to trade self-will from the left hand of primitive magic to the right hand of applied science. What matters is a changed disposition and reference in this whole final commerce of man with his universe. Call it pure religion or pure science, the name does not matter. The one thing needful is that temper and disposition towards the will of God which we find in Jesus, Bernard, Pascal and Lister alike. The men who returned from the third attempt to climb Mount Everest, made in the summer of 1924, have told us that from now on the character of the endeavor is clearly defined in advance. One of them has recently said that the higher altitudes, from 22,000 to 28,000 feet, reached by the last party, were attained not by sportsmen and scientists breaking the mountain to their intention, but by men who had come to feel towards the mountain an almost mystical relationship. He said that the mountain itself, with its tremendous appeal, must take men to the top, and that only a spirit, which for the want of any other accurate word must be called religion, would ever carry men the last exacting two thousand feet. What he seems to mean is that, in the presence of that imperious and majestic reality, the cheap coercive attempt to conquer the world must always break down, and that only something like the spirit of worship can draw and lift men at the last. The climbing of Mount Everest has ceased to be purely a geographical, political, and physiological problem. It has passed, as every great human endeavor must finally pass, into the realm of religion. And only the man whose peace is found in the imperious will of that terrific reality will ever stand upon its summit. After he had dragged the blankets out of the empty tent at Camp VI, high up on the shoulder of Everest, and had laid them in a “T” on the snow to tell the watchers below that there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine, Odell closed the flap of the tent and began the third retreat to India. “I glanced up,” he says, “at the mighty summit above me, which ever and anon deigned to reveal its cloud-wreathed features. It seemed to look down with cold indifference on me, mere puny man, and to howl derision in wind gusts at my petition to yield up its secret—the mystery of my friends. What right had we to venture thus far into the holy presence of the Supreme Goddess, or much more to sling at her our blasphemous challenges. If it were indeed the sacred ground of Chomo Lungma—the Goddess Mother of the Mountain Snows—had we violated it, was I now violating it? Had we approached her with due reverence and singleness of heart and purpose?” That, in modern parable, is the crux of the temptation in the wilderness. Magic in us dies and religion is born with that question which, if rightly answered, prefaces the true reference of the soul to God. What right have I to make trial of my God? Have I violated his holy being with my self-will? Have I approached him with due reverence and singleness of mind and heart?" - Willard L. Sperry, fully Willard Learoyd Sperry
"Sweet stream that winds through yonder glade, Apt emblem of a virtuous maid Silent and chaste she steals along, Far from the world's gay busy throng: With gentle yet prevailing force, Intent upon her destined course; Graceful and useful all she does, Blessing and blest where'er she goes; Pure-bosom'd as that watery glass, And Heaven reflected in her face. " - William Cowper
"God Hides His People - To lay the soul that loves him low, Becomes the Only–wise: To hide beneath a veil of woe, The children of the skies. Man, though a worm, would yet be great; Though feeble, would seem strong; Assumes an independent state, By sacrilege and wrong. Strange the reverse, which, once abased, The haughty creature proves! He feels his soul a barren waste, Nor dares affirm he loves. Scorned by the thoughtless and the vain, To God he presses near; Superior to the world's disdain, And happy in its sneer. Oh welcome, in his heart he says, Humility and shame! Farewell the wish for human praise, The music of a name! But will not scandal mar the good That I might else perform? And can God work it, if he would, By so despised a worm? Ah, vainly anxious!—leave the Lord To rule thee, and dispose; Sweet is the mandate of his word, And gracious all he does. He draws from human littleness His grandeur and renown; And generous hearts with joy confess The triumph all his own. Down, then, with self–exalting thoughts; Thy faith and hope employ, To welcome all that he allots, And suffer shame with joy. No longer, then, thou wilt encroach On his eternal right; And he shall smile at thy approach, And make thee his delight. " - William Cowper
"My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"If the guilt of sin is so great that nothing can satisfy it but the blood of Jesus; and the filth of sin is so great that nothing can fetch out the stain thereof but the blood of Jesus, how great, how heinous, how sinful must the evil of sin be." - William Bridges, fully Sir William Throsby Bridges
"It was one evening at the close of a September month and a September day that two equestrians might be observed passing along one of those old and lonely Irish roads that seemed, from the nature of its construction, to have been paved by a society of antiquarians, if a person could judge from its obsolete character, and the difficulty, without risk of neck or limb, of riding a horse or driving a carriage along it. Ireland, as our English readers ought to know, has always been a country teeming with abundance - a happy land, in which want, destitution, sickness, and famine have never been felt or known, except through the mendacious misrepresentations of her enemies. The road we speak of was a proof of this; for it was evident to every observer that, in some season of superabundant food, the people, not knowing exactly how to dispose of their shilling loaves, took to paving the common roads with them, rather than they should be utterly useless. These loaves, in the course of time, underwent the process of petrifaction, but could not, nevertheless, be looked upon as wholly lost to the country. A great number of the Irish, within six of the last preceding years - that is, from ’46 to ’ 52 - took a peculiar fancy for them as food, which, we presume, caused their enemies to say that we then had hard times in Ireland. Be this as it may, it enabled the sagacious epicures who lived upon them to retire, in due course, to the delightful retreats of Skull and Skibbereen, and similar asylums, there to pass the very short remainder of their lives in health, ease, and luxury." - William Carleton
"In yonder Grave a Druid lies Where slowly winds the Stealing Wave! The Year's best Sweets shall duteous rise To deck its Poet's sylvan Grave!" - William Collins
"It will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Time possesses nothing but the negative virtue of helping to wear itself out." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Says Spinoza: When it seems to us anything in the nature funny or silly, obscure or evil it is because we do not have only little knowledge of things, and we are ignorant system of nature and cohesion as a whole, and we want to hold things according to our thinking and our opinions, even though what he sees as our mind bad or evil is not evil or bad for the system and the laws of nature comprehensive college. But in relation to the laws of our own nature separate. As for the word of good and evil, it does not indicate something positive in itself, because the one thing the same may be simultaneously good or evil, or neither such as music, for example, it is better for Almnaqbd self evil for Alnaúh sad and lost people seemed to be his. It is not good or evil for the Dead" - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"Spinoza says: We Taatqazva reasons of all foreign hand, and move Kamoaj paid headwinds do not know anything about our fate. If a person controlled by emotions do not think only one aspect of the situation. The thought alone humans can see all aspects of his position. The passion incomplete idea. And a great instinctive emotions as the driving force, but serious as a guide for us, because every one of the instincts are looking for satisfying desires, is not interested in the interests of all personal. Any destruction came down to people because of excessive greed and love of strife or even desires ???? Obaid instincts that control them. The emotions that attack us every day linked to a part of the body that is affected more than the rest of the parts, and extreme emotions and prevent the mind from thinking only in one subject, no longer the strength to think of other things Spinoza says: We Taatqazva reasons of all foreign hand, and move Kamoaj paid headwinds do not know anything about our fate. If a person controlled by emotions do not think only one aspect of the situation. The thought alone humans can see all aspects of his position. The passion incomplete idea. And a great instinctive emotions as the driving force, but serious as a guide for us, because every one of the instincts are looking for satisfying desires, is not interested in the interests of all personal. Any destruction came down to people because of excessive greed and love of strife or even desires ???? Obaid instincts that control them. The emotions that attack us every day linked to a part of the body that is affected more than the rest of the parts, and extreme emotions and prevent the mind from thinking only in one subject, no longer the strength to think of other things Spinoza says: We Taatqazva reasons of all foreign hand, and move Kamoaj paid headwinds do not know anything about our fate. If a person controlled by emotions do not think only one aspect of the situation. The thought alone humans can see all aspects of his position. The passion incomplete idea. And a great instinctive emotions as the driving force, but serious as a guide for us, because every one of the instincts are looking for satisfying desires, is not interested in the interests of all personal. Any destruction came down to people because of excessive greed and love of strife or even desires ???? Obaid instincts that control them. The emotions that attack us every day linked to a part of the body that is affected more than the rest of the parts, and extreme emotions and prevent the mind from thinking only in one subject, no longer the strength to think of other things" - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers, and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"You can take any line of business and skill and the ones who do it the best are the ones who get the most money for it." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbor’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . ." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand -- a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods -- or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture." - Wes Jackson
"At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"The Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons." - Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, aka Jay David Whittaker Chambers
"The art of being yourself at your best is the art of unfolding your personality into the person you want to be...Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you." - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing" - Walt Disney, fully Walter Elias "Walt" Disney
"All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that delays are dangerous, and that the sluggish man — the man who roasteth not that which he took in hunting — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind." - Walter Bagehot
"A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"A sword's honor (literally 'credit') is its idleness." - Welsh Proverbs
"How to be a Poet (to remind myself) - Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill-more of each than you have-inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are so unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came." - Wendell Berry