This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman." - Wallace Stevens
"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man." - Charles Dudley Warner
"A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears." - Woodrew Lyle Wyatt, Baron Wyatt of Weeford
"Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal." - Louis K. Anspacher, fully Louis Kannan Anspacher
"Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth." - Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
"The way that we attune to our possible outcomes is through our viewpoint of life. From this perspective, every life-threatening condition of each body is already healed, peace is already present, and every child, woman, and man of our world is already fed. Now we are invited to choose the quality of thought, feeling, and emotion that allows us to “bend” the waves of time and bring these conditions into the focus of the present." - Gregg Braden
"The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'what does a woman want?'" - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and restrained will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed by the home, and the man is narrowed by the woman." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
"War is at first like a young girl with whom every man desires to flirt. And at the last is an old woman. All who meet her feel grieved and hurt." - Samuel ha-Nagid, born Samuel ibn Naghrela or Naghrillah
"A saint is like a tree. He does not call anyone, neither does he send anyone away. He gives shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, from the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it." - Anandamayi Ma, fully Sri Anandamayi Ma, also Anandamayee Ma or Anandamoyi Ma
"To be successful, a woman has to be much better at her job than a man." - Golda Meir, originally named Goldie Mabovitch, later Goldie Myerson
"If the union of man and woman is the fruit of a love that is given in purity, generosity and fidelity, then the body itself is spiritualized in the service of a love that ennobles it, and, with God’s blessing, sanctifies." - Jean Mouroux
"A beautiful woman who is pleasing to men is good only for frightening the fish when she falls into the water." - Zen Proverbs and Thoughts
"What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has come to me hungry and unfed? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?" - Sitting Bull, aka Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, born Hoka Psice NULL
"Of all the love, kindness and pleasure a man can experience in this world, nothing is more beautiful than the love of a woman. If it is granted him, and the two have a child together, they are fused in a single heart in the child, which is truly the most pleasing thing love and kindness can give, and this will always be a bond between them." - T’ai-p’ing-ching [Classic of the Highest Peace or Book of Supreme Peace] by Yü Chi NULL
"In the highest love between man and woman, or parent and child, as the person reaches the ultimates of strength, self-esteem, or individuality, so also does he simultaneously merge with the other, lose self-consciousness, and more or less transcend selfishness. The same can happen in the creative moment, in the profound aesthetic experience, in the insight experience…and others which I have generalized as peak experiences." - Abraham Harold Maslow
"We believe that the most basic of all changes in human social organization have been the result of three processes. Starting 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented in the Middle East – probably by a woman. That’s the First Wave. Roughly 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution triggered a Second Wave of change. Brute-force technologies amplified human and animal muscle power and gave rise to an urban, factory-centered way of life. Sometime after World War II, a gigantic Third Wave began transforming the planet, based on tools that amplify mind rather than muscle. The Third Wave is bigger, deeper and faster than the other two. This is the civilization of the computer, the satellite and Internet." - Alvin Toffler
"True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. And if the habit of prayer is seen to be so important for teaching a man to love his fellow men, this is because no answer is given to his prayers. Your love is based on hatred when you wrap yourself up in a certain man or woman on whom you batten as a stock of food laid by and, like dogs snarling at teach other round their trough, you fall to hating anyone who casts even a glance at your repast. you call it love, this selfish appetite. No sooner is love bestowed on you than (even as in your false friendships) you convert this free gift into servitude and bondage and, from the very moment you are loved, you begin to fancy yourself wronged." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose our feelings is to risk exposing our true self. To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk despair. To try at all is to risk failure. But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The man, the woman who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing." - Author Unknown NULL
"When Abraham Lincoln was a young man he ran for the Legislature in Illinois and was badly swamped. Next he entered business, failed and spent seventeen years of his life paying up the debts of a worthless partner. He was in love with a beautiful young woman to whom he became engagedand then, she died. Later he married a woman who was a constant burden to him. Entering politics again, he was badly defeated for Congress. He failed to get an appointment to the U.S. Land Office. He was badly defeated for the U.S. Senate. In 1856 he became a candidate for the Vice-Presidency and was again defeated. In 1858 he was defeated by Douglas. One failure after another, bad failures, great setbacks. In the face of all this he eventually became one of the country's greatest men, if not the greatest. When you think of a series of setbacks like this, doesn't it make you feel small to become discouraged, just because you think that you're having a hard time in life?" - Author Unknown NULL
"Male supremacy has not kept woman down. It has not knocked her out." - Clare Booth Luce
"To understand the world is wise than to condemn it. To study the world is better than to shun it. To use the world is nobler than to abuse it. To make the world better, lovelier, and happier, is the noblest work of man or woman... He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good an noble in a human being." - Emma Goldman
"The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection , which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character." - Emma Goldman
"True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul." - Emma Goldman
"Love of country is like love of a woman - he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good." - Felix Adler
"The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel." - George Bernard Shaw
"Today a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." - Gloria Steinem
"If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl’s weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God’s noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman. That she is a human being is of no concern to him." - Immanuel Kant
"No woman has ever told the truth of her life. The autobiographies of most famous women are a series of accounts of the outward existence, of petty details and anecdotes which give no realization of their real life. For the great moments of joy or agony they remain strangely silent." - Isadora Duncan
"What attracts us in a woman rarely binds us to her." - John Churton Collins
"What the world craves today is a more spiritual and less formal religion. To the man or woman facing death, great conflict, the big problems of human life, the forms of religion are of minor concern, while the spirit of religion is a desperately needed source of inspiration, comfort and strength." - John Davison Rockefeller, Jr.
"An idol may be undeified by many accidental causes. Marriage, in particular, is a kind of counter apotheosis, as a deification inverted. When a man becomes familiar with his goddess she quickly sinks into a woman." - Joseph Addison
"If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it as the old woman did her lost spectacles - on her own nose all the time." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today, made by past generations, was, before its appearance, a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in the heart of a woman." - Kahlil Gibran
"It would not be going too far to assert that… conflict confronts every woman who ventures upon a career of her own and hwo is… unwilling to pay for her daring with the renunciation of her femininity." - Karen Horney, born Danielsen
"We ought to regard amiability as the quality of woman, dignity that of man." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The woman was made out of a rib out of the side of Adam; not of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arms to be protected and, near his heart to be loved." - Matthew Henry
"Mankind must realize that the basic nature of the soul is spiritual. For man and woman to look upon each other only as a means to satisfy lust is to court the destruction of happiness. Slowly, bit by bit, peace of mind will go." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh