This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"God gives us always strength enough and sense enough, for every thing he wants us to do." - John Ruskin
"No one wants advice - only corroboration." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"One of the most important, but one of the most difficult things to a powerful mind is to be its own master; a pond may lay quiet in a plain, but a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in." - Joseph Addison
"The true happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions; it loves shade and solitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows; in short, it feels everything it wants within itself, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators. On the contrary, false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her. She does not receive satisfaction from the applauses which she gives herself, but from the admiration which she raises in others. She flourishes in courts and palaces, theaters and assemblies, and has no existence but when she is looked upon." - Joseph Addison
"The wise man endeavors to shine in himself; the fool to outshine others. The first is humbled by the sense of his own infirmities, the last is lifted up by the discovery of these which he observes in other men. The wise man considers what he wants, and the fool what he abounds in. The wise man is happy when he gains his own approbation, and the fool when he recommends himself to the applause of those about him." - Joseph Addison
"There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life." - Joseph Addison
"What man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"Ethical subjectivism absolves people of ever having to deliberate before making a moral judgment, whereas cultural relativism absolves people from moral responsibility so long as they follow the crowd. At the same time, almost everyone wants others to treat them with respect and be held morally culpable for their hurtful actions." - Judith A. Boss
"A fellow who gets more than he deserves wants more than he gets." - Latin Proverbs
"It is dangerous to guard something everybody wants." - Latin Proverbs
"Lust wants whatever it can have." - Latin Proverbs
"When a man seeks your advice he generally wants your praise." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Those who desire to be men in truth, not brutes in the appearance of men, must constantly endeavor to reduce the wants of the body." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"I do not understand what the man who is happy wants in order to be happier." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist - a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the engrossing, delightful care of young children - a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him." - Margaret Mead
"Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don't keep it a secret." - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
"No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved." - Mignon McLaughlin
"But repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it." - Napoleon Hill
"Anybody can do just about anything with himself that he really wants to and makes up his mind to do. We are capable of greater things than we realize. How much one actually achieves depends largely on: 1. Desire. 2. Faith. 3. Persistent Effort. 4. Ability. But if you are lacking the first three factors, your ability will not balance out the lack. So concentrate on the first three and the results will amaze you." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The supreme value is not the future but the present. The future is a deceitful time that always says to us, 'Not yet,' and thus denies us. The future is not the time of love: what person truly wants they want now. Whoever builds a house for future happiness builds a prison for the present." - Octavio Paz, born Octavio Paz Lozano
"The more various our artificial necessities, the wider is our circle of pleasure; for all pleasure consists in obviating necessities as they rise; luxury, therefore, as it increases our wants, increases our capacity for happiness." - Oliver Goldsmith
"The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down." - Oprah Winfrey, born Oprah Gail Winfrey
"It is important to differentiate between your needs and your wants. Your needs are few, while your wants can be limitless. In order to find freedom and Bliss, minister only to your needs. Stop creating limitless wants and pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of false happiness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"He who wants a rose must respect the thorn." - Persian Proverbs
"The human animal needs a freedom seldom mentioned, freedom from intrusion. He needs a little privacy quite as much as he wants understanding or vitamins or exercise or praise." - Phyllis McGinley
"In the friendship of the lover there is no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you. “Just as the wolf loves the lamb, so the lover adores his beloved.”" - Plato NULL
"There is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one's own life. Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
"Everything terrifying is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants our help." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, "Anywhere but here."" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it." -
"As a result of all his education, from everything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all." - Romain Rolland
"The life of the creative person is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult... in the end working is good because it is the last refuge of the person who wants to be amused." - Saul Steinberg, fully Saul Erik Steinberg
"He who has the fewest wants is nearest the gods." - Socrates NULL
"The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods." - Socrates NULL
"He is of the earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and petty his wants and desires; yet they serve a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims, - with immortal longings, with thoughts which sweep the heavens and wander through eternity. A pigmy standing on the outward crest of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest." - Thomas Carlyle
"Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind." - Thomas Fuller
"He that wants hope is the poorest man alive." - Thomas Fuller
"Jung equates the unconscious with the soul, and so when we try to live fully consciously in an intellectually predictable world, protected form all mysteries and comfortable with conformity, we lose our everyday opportunities for the soulful life. The intellect wants to know; the soul likes to be surprised. Intellect, looking outward, wants enlightenment and the pleasure of a burning enthusiasm. The soul, always drawn inward, seeks contemplation and the more shadowy, mysterious experience of the underworld." - Thomas Moore
"Man is free the moment he wants to be." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want the lustier the growth." - Wendell Phillips
"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner
"Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it." - William Hazlitt
"To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be devout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness." - William Law
"A person who wants approval is disturbed and irritated if someone questions his attitudes and opinions. But a wise man seeks truth and therefore feels pleasure if someone raises objections since this helps him correct his mistakes." - Zelig Pliskin
"Even on the path to God, All is God. You are freed from your own desires only when God frees you. This is not effected by your own exertion, but by the grace of God... Then you entirely recognize that you do not have the right to say “I” or “mine.” At this stage you behold your helplessness; desires fall away from you and you become free and calm. You desire what God desires; your own desires are gone, you are emancipated from your wants, and I have gained peace and joy in both worlds. First, action is necessary, then knowledge, in order that you may know that you know nothing and are no one. This is not easy to know. It is a thing that cannot be rightly learned by instruction, nor sewed on with needle nor tied on with thread. It is the gift of God." - Abu Sa’id ibn abi Khayr