This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"For any human being, the purification of character is done thus . . . with good thoughts, good words, good deeds." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"If this word should turn out to be a 'Te moriturum saluto,' perhaps it will brighten the dark moments a little to think how you have meant to someone more than anything ever has or ever will. What you have striven for will not end in nothing, all that you have done and been will not be wasted, for it will be a part of me as long as I live, and I shall remember, always." - Vera Mary Brittain
"A rescuing idea is one that disagrees with your habitual nature but which agrees with Truth." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Awareness is knowing that you don’t know what you are doing." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Life cannot make sense on the level of life." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"No one loves me? What has that to do with me?" - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Realize that ordinary thoughts cannot contact God. This explains why past attempts to reach higher help have failed. Usual thought is filled with egotism, which blocks contact." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The intelligent reaction toward trouble is to ask, How can I think clearly toward this?" - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Try to see what attitudes rule your day, then ask what kind of a day you usually have." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"What exactly is suffering? Our pains are caused by our wrong viewpoints toward things. The false self throws up an imaginary picture of how it insists things should be. And every time this 'should be' clashes with what actually happens, we react painfully. The problem is not what actually happens, but our demands that something else should happen. Don't take my word for this; experiment for yourself." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"You do not have to be an experiment that failed." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"It is easier to tell our therapist about our sex life than it is to tell our accountant about our finances." - Vicki Robin
"One can never be the judge of another's grief. That which is a sorrow to one, to another is joy. Let us not dispute with any one concerning the reality of his sufferings; it is with sorrows as with countries - each man has his own." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Knowledge is also the giver of wealth or rather wealth is the by-product of knowledge." - Rig Veda, or The Rigveda
"It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the cooler, and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"It is a terrible thing, this kindess that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic and it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation." - Vannevar Bush
"Then the music strikes up, and freely they pardon the offences and faults of the enemy, and after the victories they are kind to them, if it has been decreed that they should destroy the walls of the enemy's city and take their lives." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"You know, of all the songs I have ever sung, that is the one I've had the most requests not to." - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
"The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors." - Trofim Lysenko, fully Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
"He who tells the failings of others to you will be ready to tell your failings to others." - Turkish Proverbs
"With talking the cheese ship won't move." - Turkish Proverbs
"Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.
"Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself." - Thomas J. Watson, Jr., fully Thomas John Watson, Jr.
"The fact that no two major countries have done to war since they both got McDonald’s is partly due to economic integration, but it is also due to the presence of American power and America’s willingness to use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization–from Iraq to North Korea. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.[...] McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy....It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Abstinence from all injustice to other first-rate powers is a greater tower of strength than anything that can be gained by the sacrifice of permanent tranquility for an apparent temporary advantage." - Thucydides NULL
"The Spartans meanwhile, man to man, and with their war songs in the ranks, exhorted each brave comrade to remember what he had learned before; well aware that the long training of action was of more use for saving lives than any brief verbal exhortation, though ever so well delivered." - Thucydides NULL
"The strength of an Army lies in strict discipline and undeviating obedience to its officers." - Thucydides NULL
"We know that there can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name, unless the parties be persuaded of eachothers’ honesty." - Thucydides NULL
"All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
"The most important thing you do in your life is to die." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
"And steep my senses in forgetfulness." - 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
"As is a man were author of himself. Coriolanus, Act v, Scene 3" - William Shakespeare
"A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, emboweled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions." - William Godwin
"Nor is there any reason to believe that sound conviction will be less permanent in its influence than sophistry and error." - William Godwin
"What... can be more shameless than for society to make an example of those whom she has goaded to the breach of order, instead of amending her own institutions which, by straining order into tyranny, produced the mischief?" - William Godwin
"Without independence men cannot become either wise, useful, or happy." - William Godwin
"In the Platonic sense, ideas were the patterns according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
"Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious." - William James
"Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know." - William James
"O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim." - William James