This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time." - Thomas Carlyle
"I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty." - Thomas Jefferson
"Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice; and... he [can] be restrained from wrong and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice, and held to their duties by dependence on his own will." - Thomas Jefferson
"I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and I am praised, you die and I live; you are nothing and I am something, and I am all the more something because you are nothing. And thus I spend my life admiring the distance between you and me”; at times this even helps me to forget the other men who have what I have not and who have taken what I was too slow to take and who have seized what was beyond my reach, who are praised as I cannot be praised and who live on my death. The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream…." - Thomas Merton
"My opinion is that it is a very extraordinary thing for anyone to be upset by such a topic. Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God's. In damning them He is only ratifying their own decision--a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice. Nor will He ever hold our weakness alone responsible for our damnation. Our weakness should not terrify us: it is the source of our strength. Power is made perfect in infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened." - Thomas Merton
"There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet—that is, the logic of language or the experience itself—develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic*, like a plant.(* turns toward the sun)" - Thomas Merton
"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest." - Thomas Merton
"The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world." - Thomas Nagel
"I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good." - Thomas Paine
"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity." - Thomas Paine
"It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature." - William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
"Muslims will allow attacks on Allah: there are atheists and atheistic publications and rationalistic societies, but to disparage Muhammad will provoke from even the most liberal sections of the community a fanaticism of blazing vehemence." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"The fool who persists in his folly will become wise." - William Blake
"However the development proceeds in detail, the path so far traced by the quantum theory indicates that an understanding of those still unclarified features of atomic physics can only be acquired by foregoing visualization and objectification to an extent greater than that customary hitherto. We have probably no reason to regret this, because the thought of the great epistemological difficulties with which the visual atom concept of earlier physics had to contend gives us the hope that the abstracter atomic physics developing at present will one day fit more harmoniously into the great edifice of Science." - Werner Heisenberg, fully Werner Karl Heisenberg
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Either define the moment or the moment will define you." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"There is no week, nor day, nor hour, when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves - and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air." - Walter Winchell
"Women commiserate the brave, and men the beautiful." - Walter Savage Landor
"I feel less worried about thieves now because I feel safer on the train. Before, we sometimes encountered bad guys who caused trouble with us trying to extort our money during the long trips. Now there are hardly any of these guys." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng
"Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing." - Wang Yang-Ming or Yangming, aka Wang Shouren or Wang Shou-jen, courtesy name Bo'an
"The primary test of managerial economic performance, is the achievement of a high earnings rate, on equity capital employed (without undue leverage, accounting gimmickry, etc.), and not the achievement of consistent gains in earnings per share." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"The supreme irony of business management is that it is far easier for an inadequate CEO to keep his job than it is for an inadequate subordinate.... At too many companies, the boss shoots the arrow of managerial performance and then hastily paints the bullseye around the spot where it lands." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town." - Washington Irving
"The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind." - Washington Irving
"We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do." - Wendell Berry
"I have some very definite pear-shaped ideas that I'd like to discuss with thee." - W. C. Fields, stage name for William Claude Dukenfield
"To master anything from football to relativity requires effort. But it does not require unpleasant efforts, drudgery. The main task of any teacher is to make a subject interesting." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy
"What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious." - Walker Percy
"Architects should be educated, skillful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"In view of the fact that this criticism of Marxism has long been directed from the political platform, from university chairs, in numerous pamphlets and in a series of learned treatises, in view of the fact that the entire younger generation of the educated classes has been systematically reared for decades on this criticism, it is not surprising that the new critical trend in Social-Democracy should spring up, all complete, like Minerva from the head of Jove." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"We know that an unskilled laborer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Between here and that old car outside there are twenty-five paces. Make them. Now." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms -- some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
"Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more... to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it... Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Fighting inner darkness in the wrong way is the same as submitting to it. Truth will show you how to truly fight for light." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Think of this one important sentence and reflect on it often: TOO MUCH OF ME IN MY LIFE." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes. - The flowers fading like our hopes, the leaves falling like our years, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies." - François-René de Chateaubriand, fully François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
"Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"The reaction is normal about the abnormal position is a response together" - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population." - Vannevar Bush
"But we embrace the loss, the lure alone love fools us with. That glimpse of heavenly light, that foretaste of eternal Good, we miss." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"If you wish others to know about your good deeds, they are not truly good deeds." - Hsuan Hua, aka An Tzu and Tu Lun