This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Nature is no sentimentalist, does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ships like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills -- against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. ‘Give me a place to stand,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will move the world.’ These men moved the world, and so can we all." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"One is not born a woman – one becomes one." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"God did not create woman from man's head, that he should command her, nor from his feet that she should be his slave, but rather from his side, that she should be near his heart." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Woman entices with her heart and man with his mouth, and this is a superior trait in woman." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"To seek God too soon is not less sinful than to seek God too late; we must love, man, woman or child, we must exhaust ambition, intellect, desire, dedicating all things as they pass, or we come to God with empty hands." - William Butler Yeats
"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls: who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'twas mind, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands. But he that filches me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed." -
"A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her, but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"It is... possible for a civilized man and woman to be happy in marriage, although if this is to be the case a number of conditions must be fulfilled. There must be a feeling of complete equality on both sides; there must be no interference with mutual freedom; there must be the most complete physical and mental intimacy; and there must be a certain similarity in regard to standards of values." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what a man or woman is able to do that counts." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington
"When a woman weeps, she is setting traps with her tears. " - Dionysius Cato
"Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure." - Edward FitzGerald, fully Edward Marlborough FitzGerald
"A fair woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatory to the purse, and a hell to the soul." - Elizabeth Grymeston (or Grimston)
"In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate." - Elizabeth Gould Davis
"We don`t really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within. In the beginning, I believe man was complete and androgynous-both male and female, or neither, like angels. Then came the division, and Eve was taken from him. So the problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can`t become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It`s his responsibility, not hers. He can`t be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo." - Federico Fellini
"To be in love is not the same as loving. You can be in love with a woman and still hate her." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"With what moral authority can they speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated? How can they do this — the bosses of an empire where the mafia, gambling, and child prostitution are imposed; where the CIA organizes plans of global subversion and espionage, and the Pentagon creates neutron bombs capable of preserving material assets and wiping out human beings; an empire that supports reaction and counter-revolution all over the world; that protects and promotes the exploitation by monopolies of the wealth and the human resources of whole continents, unequal exchange, a protectionist policy, an incredible waste of natural resources, and a system of hunger for the world?" - Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
"What was once impossible now summons us to dismantle the walls between ourselves and our sisters and brothers, to dissolve the distinctions between flesh and spirit, to transcend the present limits of time and matter, to find, at last, not wealth or power but the ecstasy (so long forgotten) of commonplace, unconditional being. For the atom's soul is nothing but energy. Spirit blazes in the dullest of clay. The life of every woman or man-the heart of it-is pure and holy joy." - George Leonard, fully George Burr Leonard
"Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories." - Graham Greene
"A man's only as old as the woman he feels. " - Groucho Marx, Pseudonym for Julius Henry Marx
"Real freedom happens only when your life becomes so total in each moment that there is no need to decide; that totality decides. Do you follow me? -- the totality itself decides. You are not facing two alternatives: whether to marry this woman or that. Your heart is totally with one. There is no motive so you are not divided, and there is no confusion. If you decide out of confusion you will create conflict. Confusion will take you into deeper confusions. Never decide out of confusion." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
"Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. " - James Allen
"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." - James Truslow Adams
"A man can keep another's secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others. " - Jean de La Bruyère
"The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet." - Jeremy Rifkin
"In woman sex corrects banality, in men it aggravates it." - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
"I think, both in justice and compassion, [all] should unite in despising the man who dares to use a deserving woman ill, because he has not a heart to value her." - John Newton, fully John Henry Newton
"Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do. " - José Ortega y Gasset
"I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child." - Joseph Campbell
"No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation." - Knut Hamsun
"Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right... is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"I have never heard a successful man or woman get up and say, "I owe my success to drugs and alcohol."" - Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
"There is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen." - Louis Bromfield
"In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart." - Louise Bogan
"The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source." - Lucretia Mott, fully Lucretia Coffin Mott
"The promise of "beauty"- of being desirable- lulls the young woman [Sleeping Beauty] into an existential limbo where everything is measured by the expectation of one who is to come...The kiss that Sleeping Beauty waits for is not that of any Prince, but the embrace of her own being." - Madonna Kolbenschlag, fully Madonna Claire Kolbenschlag
"It is easy to look back, self-indulgently, feeling pleasantly sorry for oneself and saying I didn't have this and I didn't have that. But it is only the grown woman regretting the hardships of a little girl who never thought they were hardships at all. She had the things that really mattered." - Marian Anderson
"The "ultimate" questions referred to above do not always come up in the encounter with the shadow. Much more often behind him or her another inner figure emerges as a personification of the unconscious. This takes the form of a woman in a man, and in a woman, that of a man. Often it is they who are at work behind the shadow, throwing up new problems. C. G. Jung called them anima and animus. The anima embodies all feminine psychic qualities in a man-moods, feelings, intuitions, receptivity to the irrational, his personal capacity for love, his sense of nature, and most important of all, his relationship to the unconscious. " - Marie-Louise von Franz
"I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)" - Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher
"The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men... The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story." - Mary Ritter Beard
"Faith is wanting something with all your heart. Faith is taking a chance on something before you are sure how everything will work out. Almost anything can be accomplished by the person who really wants to succeed. But no woman will ever believe she can move a mountain unless she really wants that mountain to move. Apply this definition of faith to your dreams. " - Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
"No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed." - Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton
"A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
"A chaste woman ought not to dye her hair yellow." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man." - Mignon McLaughlin
"Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"The reputation of a woman may be compared to a mirror, shining and bright, but liable to be sullied by every breath that comes near it." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa