This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Mind set free in the Dharma-realm, I sit at the moon-filled window Watching the mountains with my ears, Hearing the stream with open eyes. Each molecule preaches perfect law, Each moment chants true sutra: The most fleeting thought is timeless, A single hair's enough to stir the sea." - Ryushu Shutaku
"Language is slow; the mastery of wants doth teach it to the infant, drop by drop, as brooklets gather. Yet there is a love, simple and sure, that asks no discipline of weary years, the language of the soul, told through the eye. The stammering lip oft mars the perfect thought; but the heart's lightning hath no obstacle. Quick glances, like the thrilling wires, transfuse the telegraphic look." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"Meditation is the nurse of thought, and thought the food for meditation." - Charles Simmons
"I once gave a lady two-and-twenty receipts against melancholy; one was a bright fire; another, to remember all the pleasant things said to her; another, to keep a box of sugarplums on the chimney-piece and a kettle simmering on the hob. I thought this mere trifling at the moment, but have in after life discovered how true it is that these little pleasures often banish melancholy better than higher and more exalted objects; and that no means ought to be thought too trifling which can oppose it either in ourselves or in others." - Sydney Smith
"The essence of every species of wit is surprise; which, vi termini, must be sudden; and the sensations which wit has a tendency to excite are impaired or destroyed as often as they are mingled with much thought or passion." - Sydney Smith
"The poet paints the thought of the philosopher, the philosopher analyzes the picture of the poet, and hence arises the stereotyped form of quotation." - Moritz Steinschneider
"Every man has some peculiar train of thought which he falls back upon when he is alone. This, to a great degree, moulds the man." - Dugald Stewart
"All men have poetry in their hearts, and it is necessary for them, as much as possible, to express their feelings. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can refreshingly become their own, age after age. All great languages undergo change. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed and will never produce great harvests of thought and literature. When forms become fixed, the spirit either weakly accepts its imprisonment or rebels. All revolutions consists of the “within” fighting against invasion from “without”... All great human movements are related to some great idea." -
"If these little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to employ and hallow a fancy." - Jeremy Taylor
"All the past of Time reveals a bridal dawn of thunder-peals, whenever Thought hath wedded Fact." - Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
"O guard thy roving thoughts with jealous care, for speech is but the dialplate of thought; and every fool reads plainly in thy words what is the hour of thy thought." - Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, Commonly called Alfred Lord Tennyson
"I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"If meditation is aimed at curing an illness the practicer should forget all about the thought of curing it, and if it is for improving health he should forget all about the idea of improvement, because when mind and objects are forgotten everything will be void and the result thus achieved will be the proper one... If the thoughts of curing an illness and of improving health are clung to the mind will be stirred and no result can be expected." - Yin Shih Tsu
"The history of thought can be summarized in these words: It is absurd by what it seeks, great by what it finds." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so. " - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"If reality flows like a stream, then knowledge of such reality also becomes fluid, a process rather than a set of fixed truths. And because all knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated and applied in thought; then thought too must be seen as part of the same eternal tide... Thought is, in essence, a response of memory. It consists of a repetition of some image or sensation, or it involves a combination or reorganisation of such repetition in a new and useful way. So, in the end, intelligence turns out to be part of the flow. It is not grounded in cells or molecules, but drawn from the same moving stream as reality. In other words, mind and matter are ultimately inseparable." - Lyall Watson
"No life, no mind, no thought or inspiration can exist in isolation." - Lyall Watson
"There is no way of confining thought. We cannot say where it begins or ends. Everything flows together into one unbroken totality of movement which does not belong to any particular place, person or time." - Lyall Watson
"There seems to be direct link between truly creative intelligence and the ability to dilute consciousness, to cut mental corners and practice unusual, lateral thinking in what amounts almost to a state of trance. All the most profound insights seem to flow from breaches in the barrier between waking thought, which tends to be conservative, and dream logic, which is essential liberal." - Lyall Watson
"It is by thought that has aroused my intellect from its slumbers, which has “given lustre to virtue, and dignity to truth,” or by those examples which have inflamed my soul with the love of goodness, and not by means of sculptured marble, that I hold communion with Shakespeare and Milton, with Johnson and Burke, with Howard and Wilberforce." - Francis Wayland
"Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered." - Daniel Webster
"The most important thought I ever had was that of my individual responsibility to God." - Daniel Webster
"If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God exists, we should find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves do not exist for it is the same thought." - Simone Weil
"No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Every child s born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility." - Kate Douglas Wiggin
"It is that faculty by which we discover and enjoy the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in literature, art, and nature; which recognizes a noble thought, as a virtuous mind welcome a pure sentiment by an involuntary glow of satisfaction. While the principle of perception is inherent in the soul, it requires a certain amount of knowledge to draw out and direct it." - Robert Aris Willmott
"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
"We have in dreams no true perception of time - a strange property of mind ! - for if such be also its property when entered into the eternal disembodied state, time will appear to us eternity! The relations of space as well as of time are also annihilated, so that while almost an eternity is compressed into a moment, infinite space is traversed more swiftly than by real thought." - Hubbard Winslow
"Israel has a mission still; Truth-seeking in the world of thought, and right-doing in the world of action!" - Stephen Samuel Wise
"The body is a servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind. There is a mind/body connection that is powerful. As a healer, I am convinced disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sick thoughts express themselves through a sickly body. Thoughts of fear can kill a man. People who live in fear of disease are most likely the very people who get the disease. Conversely, if you would improve your body, guard your mind." - Greta Woodrew, Pseud. for Greta Andron Smolowe
"The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benediction." - William Wordsworth
"We can listen to the voice of the Earth as she shakes and sings her song expressing her tiredness. She is calling us to attention, to be alert, to recognize that now is the time to transform selfish thought and action to compassionate caretaking. Do we want a world of peace and harmony? Are we willing to make that peace within ourselves? Will we call it forth? It is your choice. Your thought and action make a difference." - Dhyani Ywahoo
"Thought and action are the redeeming features of our lives." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"We protract the career of time by employment, we lengthen the duration of our lives by wise thoughts and useful actions. Life to him who wishes not to have lived in vain is thought and action." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"There runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature." - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
"Unanimity is worse than censorship. Censorship obliges us to hold our own truth silent; unanimity forces us to repeat the truth of others, even thought we do not believe it… It dissolves our own personalities into a general, monotonous chorus." - Luis Aguillar
"Everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and no one can think at all except by means of the general store of thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"I have traversed the universe from the deepest depths of the empyrean to the peristaltic movements of the atoms in the elementary cell. And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels, and prodigies without limit, without number, and without end. I felt the unfathomable thought, of which the Universe is the symbols, live and burn within me; I touched, proved, tasted, embraced my nothingness and my immensity; I kissed the hem of the garments of god, and gave Him thanks for being Spirit and for being Life." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"We need to confine our hopes to what we can achieve in our lifetime, always mindful of the fact that the span of life is not guaranteed. The traditional saying `Live each day as thought it were your last’ should thus be adapted to `Live each day as if it could be your last, but could equally be just one more in your short life.’" - Julian Baggini
"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did." - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"Money, material thought it be, does lie at the base of the most useful work you do. In itself nothing, it is the basis of much of the best effort which can be made for spiritual purposes." - A. J. Balfour, fully Arthur James "A.J. Balfour, the Earl of Balfour
"We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom." - Stephen Vincent Benét