This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and dither falling in love, meeting together. It's true they are much less bound by ceremony, convention, than we are. Royal words meet with common words. English words marry French words, German words. Indian words, Negro words." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Abiding happiness and peace is theirs who choose goodness for its own sake - without expectation of any reward." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"Let us be such as help the life of the future" - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"The three greatest concerns of men are these: to make him who is an enemy a friend, to make righteous him who is wicked, and to make the ignorant learned." - Zoroaster, aka Zarathustra or Zarathushtra Spitama NULL
"There is an abiding beauty which may be appreciated by those who will see things as they are and who will ask for no reward except to see." - Vera Mary Brittain
"The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent." - Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum
"Destiny never opens one door without shutting another." - Victor Hugo
"For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind." - Victor Hugo
"It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,— one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes." - Victor Hugo
"Stronger than all the armies of the world is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
"Those men to whom their gray hairs are a constant warning, and whose time is growing short, have tasks to finish, testaments of the mind, so to speak. They may be suddenly interrupted by the coming of the end, and they have not a day to lose; hence arises the stern necessity of retirement and solitude. Man has duties to fulfill toward his thoughts." - Victor Hugo
"To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life." - Victor Hugo
"Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Sigmund Freud once asserted, “Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.” Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the individual differences did not blur but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"To discover that there was any semblance of art in a concentration camp must be a surprise enough for an outsider, but he may be even more astonished to hear that one could find a sense of humor there as well; of course, only the faint trace of one, and then only for a few seconds or minutes. Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation. It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other to invent at least one amusing story daily, about some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. He was a surgeon and had once been an assistant on the staff of a large hospital. So I once tried to get him to smile by describing to him how he would be unable to lose the habits of camp life when he returned to his former work. On the building site (especially when the supervisor made his tour of inspection) the foreman encouraged us to work faster by shouting: 'Action! Action!' I told my friend, 'One day you will be back in the operating room, performing a big abdominal operation. Suddenly an orderly will rush in announcing the arrival of the senior surgeon by shouting, Action! Action!'" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Like the deer's delusion, this world is false; and yet, beholding it, they chase after it." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"The balanced persons will be active because it is their duty. They will not be agitated by anything - failure or success. The Godly will take up activity as a means of worshipping God; and they leave the result to God. They know that they are but instruments in the hands of God." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"This ocean too is vast and full of mystery; it has its unplumbed depths. It tosses man about from birth to death and again from death to birth." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"At last Paul went on. I know how it is, son. You won't do it, you haven't the nerve for it-you're soft. He waited, while those cruel words sank in. Yes, that's the word, soft. You've always had everything you wanted- you've had it handed to you on a silver tray, and it's made you a weakling. You have a good heart, you know what's right, but you couldn't bear to act, you'd be too afraid of hurting somebody." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Chophouse. It was his descriptions of meat, though, that most concerned Americans. Even President Theodore Roosevelt seemed to be more shocked by the details of how cattle and hogs were being sliced into beef and pork--and by how much condemned meat was ending up on American dinner tables--than by the workers' plight. Within a matter of months, Sinclair's book became an international bestseller and sparked legislation regulating the meat industry for the first time. I aimed for the public's heart ... and by accident I hit it in the stomach." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich? What are we to say when we see idealism become hypocrisy, and the moral and spiritual heritage of mankind twisted to the knavish purposes of class-cruelty and greed? What I say is — Bootstrap-lifting!" - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"There’s no excuse for poverty in a state as rich as California. We can produce so much food that we have to dump it into our bay." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
"All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don't, our lives get made up for us by other people." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. You must change your life, he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"I still very well remember the moment in 1978 when me and my friends learned that Karol Wojtyla was elected the pope. It was a moment of an immense joy for us. I even think that we were so delighted that we danced for joy." - Václav Havel
"There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all." - Václav Havel
"You cannot count on the physical proximity of someone you love, all the time. A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted. Rama will be in my care, and he will be quite well. But ultimately, he will leave me too. Every human being, when the time comes, has to depart to seek his fulfillment in his own way." - Valmiki NULL
"However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?" - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL
"Always be honest and open in your speech and actions. Don't be sneaky or evasive with anyone. A straight mind is the Bodhimanda." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun
"In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you are doing rather than to get the right answer" - Tom Lehrer, fully Thomas Andrew Lehrer
"A knife-wound heals, but a tongue wound festers. (Used to make a point that one should be careful before using hurtful language.)" - Turkish Proverbs
"Don't tell your secret to your friend, he will tell it to his friend." - Turkish Proverbs
"Kind words will unlock an iron door." - Turkish Proverbs
"There is no remedy for what will be and who will die." - Turkish Proverbs
"Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us. But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will." - Thomas R. Kelly, fully Thomas Raymond Kelly
"Test each sect by its best or its worst, as you will,--by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own." - Thomas Wentworth Higginson
"I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"Customary greeting to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, “What's shaking, chiefy baby?”" - Thurgood Marshall
"A braggart has no courage, muddy water has no depth." - Tibetan Proverbs
"Better once to see than many times to hear." - Tibetan Proverbs
"If I know I will die tomorrow, I can still learn something tonight." - Tibetan Proverbs