This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The pleasure we feel with what we have does not come only from the thing itself, but also from whom we received it. That is the lessons of the blessings we make. They help us appreciate that the Almighty is the One who has bestowed us with the pleasures of this world - this awareness greatly enhances the value of these pleasures." -
"Perception... is a constant communion between ourselves and the living world that encompasses us." - David Abram
"The reward of the souls in the world beyond is their ability to attain the true concept of God which is a source of the most wonderful felicity, an attainment impossible for man in this early life because of the disturbances on the part of matter." - Isaac Abravanel, fully Don Itshak ben Yehouda Abravanel
"Facts, when combined with ideas, constitute the greatest force in the world. They are greater than armaments, greater than finance, greater than science, business and law because they constitute the common denominator of all of them." - Carl William Ackerman
"We can accomplish almost anything within our ability if we but think we can! Every great achievement in this world was first carefully thought out... Think - but to a purpose. Think constructively. Think as you read. Think as you listen. Think as you travel and eyes reveal new situations. Think as you work daily at your place in life. There can be no advancement or success without serious thought." - George Matthew Adams
"Man is a creature of impulse, emotion, action rather than reason. Reason is a very late development in the world of living creatures, most of whom, as far as we know, get along admirably in daily life without it." - James R. Adams
"The immortal mind, superior to his fate, amid the outrage of external things, firm as the solid base of this great world, rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds! Ye waves! Ye thunders! Roll your tempests on! Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky! Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene, the unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck; and ever stronger as the storms advance, firm through the closing ruin holds is way, when nature calls him to the destin'd goal." - Mark Akenside
"To be of use in the world is the only way to be happy." - Hans Christian Anderson
"Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out of it; and of that which is coming into existence part is already extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always renewing the infinite duration of ages. In this flowing stream, then on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows, which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
"I regret not death. I am going to meet my friends in another world." - Ludovico Ariosto
"One of the great problems that must be solved in any attempt to work out a scientific world-view is that of bringing the being who puts forward the world-view within the world-view. By treating man, including his mental processes, as a purely, as a purely physical object, operating according to exactly the same laws as all other physical things, this object is achieved with the greatest possible intellectual economy. The knower differs from the world he knows only in the greater complexity of his physical organization." - David Malet Armstrong, aka D. M. Armstrong
"The phenomenal world is like an empty jar (enclosing Space, which nevertheless is boundless). Thus known, phenomenality need be neither renounced, accepted, nor destroyed." - Ashtavakra NULL
"To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?" - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"What people will say - in these words there lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words bear sway everywhere." - Berthold Auerbach
"The world is a great book, of which they who never stir from home read only a page." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers." - J. L. Austin, fully John Langshaw Austin
"Anything in the world, absolutely anything, can serve as medicine if administered at the right time and in the right place." - Ayurveda NULL
"Better is one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world than a whole life in the World to Come." - Babylonian Talmud
"Man comes into the world with grasping hands, but leaves it with open hands." - Babylonian Talmud
"The thought that is beautiful is the thought to cherish. The word that is beautiful is worthy to ensure. The act that is beautiful is eternally and always true and right. Only be aware that your appreciation of beauty is just and true; and to that end, I urge you to live intimately with beauty of the highest type, until it has become a part of you , until you have within you that fineness, that order, that calm, which puts you in tune with the finest things of the universe, and which links you with that spirit that is the enduring life of the world." - Bertha Bailey
"You'll do well to remember that in all the world there is no word more important than - "Think!"" - Edwin Baird
"Enthusiasm moves the world." - Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
"It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth." - Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, fully Arthur James Balfour, aka Lord Balfour
"What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of heaven?" - Clara Lucas Balfour
"If all the gold in the world were melted down into a solid cube, it would be about the size of an eight-room house. If a man got possession of all that gold - billions of dollars' worth, he could not buy a friend, character, peace of mind, clear conscience, or a sense of eternity." - Charles F. Banning
"When we come to die, we shall be alone. From our worldly possessions we shall be about to part. Worldly friends - the friends drawn to us by our position, our wealth, or our social qualities, will leave us as we enter the dark valley. From those bound to us by stronger ties - our kindred, our loved ones, children, brothers, sister, and from those not less dear to us who have been made our friends because they and we are the friends of the same Savior - from them also we must part. Yet not all will leave us. There is One who “sticketh closer than a brother” - One who having loved His own which are in the world loves them to the end." - Albert Barnes
"Life, if properly viewed in any aspect, is great, but mainly great when viewed in its relation to the world to come." - Albert Barnes
"This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or another, we pay for her favors; or we go away empty." - Amelia Barr, fully Amelia Edith Barr Huddleston
"We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it." - J.M. Barrie, fully Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet
"Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction." - Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
"He who wishes to fulfill his mission in the world must be a man of one idea, that is of one great overmastering purpose, overshadowing all his aims, and guiding and controlling his entire life." - Julius Bate
"Before I started on my trip around the world, someone gave me one of the most valuable hints I have ever had. It consists merely in shutting your eyes when you are in the midst of a great moment, or close to some marvel of time or space, and convincing yourself that you are at home again with the experience over and past; and what would you wish most to have examined or done if you could turn time and space back again." - William Beebe, fully Charles William Beebe
"He that will live in this world must be endued with the three rare qualities of dissimulation, equivocation, and mental reservation." - Aphra Behn
"Good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world as one which enables him to sustain failure." - Bernard Iddings Bell, formerly Bruce Chilton, fully Canon Bernard Iddings Bell
"There is no one who cannot find a place for himself in our kind of world. Each of us has some unique capacity waiting for realization. Every person is valuable in his own existence - for himself alone." - George H. Bender
"All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"In that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present moment is constituted by the quasi-instantaneous section effected by our perception in the flowing mass; and this section is precisely that which we call the material world. Our bodies occupies its centre; it is, in this material world, that part of which we directly feel the flux; in its actual state the actuality of our present lies." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul; it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are companions of his dreams, they are the world in which he lives." - Bettina Skrzypczak
"In the germ, when the first trace of life begins to stir, music is the nurse of the soul; it murmurs in the ear, and the child sleeps; the tones are companions of his dreams, they are the world in which he lives." - Antoine Bettini
"For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"No atom of mater in the whole vastness of the universe is lost. How then can man’s soul, which comprises the whole world in one idea, be lost?" - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"Take a fresh look at celebrating the Sabbath. Consider spending one day a week being childlike, consciously breaking the deliberate, patterned life you have adopted. Without this destructuring, spiritual life becomes too serious and goal-oriented. Throughout the week, we live in the world of becoming, always striving to perfect ourselves spiritually. On the Sabbath, we drop all forms of becoming and inhabit the world of being, living in the end-state of all practice as if it had already occurred. From this most crucial of spiritual practices flows the inspiration to carry us through the entire week." - Mother Tessa Bielecki
"Sleep and death - they differ in duration rather than in quality. Perhaps both are sojourns in the spiritual, the real world. In one case our carriage waits nightly to take us back from the entrance of slumber, while in the other, having arrived at our destination and with no further use for the carriage..." -
"Nature is the most thrifty thing in the world; she never wastes anything; she undergoes change, but there is no annihilation, the essence remains - matter is eternal." - Horace Binney