This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Real knowledge, like everything else of value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and more than all, must be prayed for." - Thomas Arnold, aka Thomas "Tom" Arnold the Younger
"It was not until I was forty that I was able to go into a room and say to myself, 'What do I think of these people?' Before that, I always thought, 'What do these people think of me?'" - Brooke Astor, (née Russell, previously Kuser and Marshall) also known as Mrs Vincent Astor
"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one every thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"The thought that is beautiful is the thought to cherish. The word that is beautiful is worthy to ensure. The act that is beautiful is eternally and always true and right. Only be aware that your appreciation of beauty is just and true; and to that end, I urge you to live intimately with beauty of the highest type, until it has become a part of you , until you have within you that fineness, that order, that calm, which puts you in tune with the finest things of the universe, and which links you with that spirit that is the enduring life of the world." - Bertha Bailey
"Tolerance of opinions which are thought to be innocuous is as easy, as acts of charity that entail no sacrifice. But the test of a free society is its tolerance of what is deplored or despised by a majority of its members. The argument for such tolerance must be made on the ground that it is useful to the society... that free societies are better fitted to survive than closed societies." - Alan Barth
"Nothing is thought rare which is not new, and followed; yet we know that what was worn some twenty years ago comes into grace again." - Beaumont and Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (c.1585-1614) and John Fletcher
"The price of wisdom is eternal thought." - Francis Lyall "Frank" Birch
"One thought fills immensity." - William Blake
"Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot." - William Blake
"Man have long begun to suspect that civilization's repression of our primitive impulses has somehow warped what are potentially the most productive forces in human nature. We are increasingly disturbed by the thought that society's passion for obedience and conformity may have overreached itself, causing us to lose in individual happiness perhaps as much as we have gained in group activity." -
"If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"The habit of reflecting gives an inner life, which all that we see animates and embellishes. In this disposition of the soul everything becomes an object of thought." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"A good thought is a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked, then he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the man who is the first to quote it to us." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and insensibly approximate to the characters we most admire. In this way, a generous habit of thought and of action carries with it an incalculable influence." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we must upon it." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"The greatest events of an age are its best thoughts. It is the nature of thought to find its way into action." - John Christian Bovee
"There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought." - Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, Baron Broghill
"Thinking is the process that I hold in horror. I have thought for fifty years, with the most ghastly and disastrous results, mostly thoughts of my own, and if I attempt to superpose the thoughts of other people, I find my mental equipment utterly inadequate to the strain." - Gamaliel Bradford
"Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement." - Claude M. Bristol
"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully." - William Cullen Bryant
"Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"All that I have accomplished, or expect or hope to accomplish, has been and will be by that plotting, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap, particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact." - Elihu Burritt
"We are forming characters for eternity. Forming characters! Whose? our own or other? Both - and in that momentous fact lies the peril and responsibility of our existence. Who is sufficient for the thought?" - Elihu Burritt
"There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do." - Nicholas Murray Butler
"Thought pure and simple is as near to God as we can get, it is through this that we are linked with God." - Samuel Butler
"But when science, passing beyond its own limits, assumes to take the place of theology, and sets up its own conception of the order of nature as a sufficient account of its cause, it is invading a province of thought to which it has no claim, and not unreasonably provokes the hostility of its best friends." -
"The three foundations of thought: Perspicuity, amplitude and justness. The three ornaments of thought: Clearness, correctness and novelty." - Joanne Catherall
"All that man does outwardly is but the expression and completion of his inward thought. To work effectually, he must think clearly; to act nobly, he must think nobly. Intellectual force is a principal element of the soul's life, and should be proposed by every man as the principal end of his being." - William Ellery Channing
"Ideas are the mightiest influence on earth. One great thought breathed in to a man may regenerate him." - William Ellery Channing
"Secret study, silent thought, is, after all, the mightiest agent in human affairs." - William Ellery Channing
"The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought." - William Ellery Channing
"They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections - we must chew them over again." - William Ellery Channing
"Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery - into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin
"As soon as a true thought has entered our mind, it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects which we have never perceived before." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Thought has always worked by opposition... By dual, hierarchized oppositions... Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples." - Hélène Cixous
"I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts." - William Benton Clulow
"One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one's mind." - Robert Collier
"Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted." - Robert Collier