This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Talent wears well, genius wears itself out; talent drives a brougham in fact; genius, a sun-chariot in fancy. " - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
"By a union courtesy and talent an adversary may be made to grace his own defeat, as the sandal-tree perfumes the hatchet that cuts it down." - Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
"I don’t care how much talent a team has - if the boys don’t think tough, practice tough, and live tough, how can they play tough on Saturday’s?" - Bear Bryant, fully Paul William "Bear" Bryant
"Everyone knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it but the majority of us have to re-learn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception, needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relieve certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter; because there is a connecting thread. " - Paulo Coelho
"We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. " - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"Only one thing to it: a strong stomach. The guts to gladhand a man you're going to stab in the back; pledge allegiance to principles you stomp on every day; righteously denounce some despot in the press and sell him arms under the table. The talent to whip up the voters' worst passions while you seem to call on their highest instincts, and the sense to stay wrapped in the flag. That's politics: I'll take the simple life. " - Pierre Beaumarchais, fully Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
"Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is identical with equality of rights; that property and robbery are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it." - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
"Life is entrusted to man as a treasure which must not be squandered, as a talent which must be used well. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
"I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking. " - Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
"Open Letter to the Holy Father. I take the liberty to write to You again… I can’t imagine that any other person in the world would have Your courage, Your credibility, as well as Your personal talent and God's grace to be able to speak up against an old tradition [of parents beating their children]… I am asking You again to make an appeal to all parents urging them to no longer beat their children, and to tell them that it is highly dangerous. If the Church continues to ignore the new scientific information and to stay silent about this issue in spite of the lessons of Jesus, who else can be asked to open the parents’ eyes in order to prevent the blind escalation of violence? I am sure that if my letters succeed to reach You personally You will not stay indifferent to the knowledge they are trying to pass on to you. With my most profound respect, Alice Miller." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski
"Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work." - Albert Einstein
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking. " - Albert Einstein
"If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being." - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt
"Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture." - Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
"Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up, because by that time I was too famous." - Robert Benchley, fully Robert Charles Benchley
"Domestic happiness depends upon the ability to overlook." - Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist
"He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there, and he says to me in this ad, "Until you have the guts to call me a 'phony soldier' to my face, stop telling lies about my service." You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into." - Rush Limbaugh
"I hope you will be benefitted by your churchgoing. Where the habit does not Christianize, it generally civilizes. That is reason enough for supporting churches, if there were no higher." - Rutherford B. Hayes, fully Rutherford Birchard Hayes
"Anecdotes are the gleaming toys of history. The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Somebody who never got over the embarrassing fact that he was born in bed with a lady." - Sydney J. Harris
"I believe… that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people… I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and—if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills—on the businessman's special to Tokyo." - Stephan Jay Gould
"We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous." - Stephan Jay Gould
"What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo
"The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new." - Thomas Carlyle
"The deadliest sin were the consciousness of no sin." - Thomas Carlyle
"The true past departs not, no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not, lives and works through endless change." - Thomas Carlyle
"Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions." - Thomas Jefferson
"Whence arose all the horrid assassinations of whole nations of men, women, and infants, with which the Bible is filled; and the bloody persecutions, and tortures unto death, and religiosu wars, that since that time have laid Europe in blood and ashes; whence arose they, but from this impious thing called religion, and this monstrous belief that God has spoken to man?" - Thomas Paine
"We will never have Fascism in England; no Englishman will dress up, not even for a revolution." - William Bolitho, pen name for Charles William Ryall
"It is in your character of Prime Minister that I take the liberty of prefixing your Lordship's name to this “Tale of Irish Famine”. Had Sir Robert Peel been in office, I would have placed his name where that of your Lordship now stands. There is something not improper in this; for although I believe that both you and he are sincerely anxious to benefit our unhappy country, still I cannot help thinking that the man who in his ministerial capacity, must be looked upon as a public exponent of those principals of Government which have brought our country to her present calamitous condition, by a long course of illiberal legislation and unjustifiable neglect, ought to have his name placed before a story which details with truth the sufferings which such legislation and neglect have entailed upon our people." - William Carleton
"I guess no individual ever invented can pass the buck as quick as a nation can." - Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
"Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"My dear, he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her." - Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
"It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture." - Wilhelm Reich
"Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"That industry is in a state of flux right now. It's historically earned very good returns on invested capital, but it could well be that the world will unfold differently in the future than in the past. I'm not sure I can give you a good answer on that." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"Anything that has been accomplished by any other human being in the physical realm is within the field of possibility." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
"Without wife without strife." - Welsh Proverbs
"Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night, with your unconstraining voice still persuade us to rejoice; with the farming of a verse make a vineyard of the curse, sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress; in the deserts of the heart let the healing fountain start, in the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"In my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett
"Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere." - V. S. Pritchett, fully Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett