This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony." - John Muir
"Few learn much from history who do not bring much with them to its study." - John Stuart Mill
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." - John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
"Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it’s not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"We must learn to free ourselves from the traditional idea which would have reality always consist in some thing, be it physical or mental." - José Ortega y Gasset
"We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is… of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being." - Joseph Campbell
"A positive emotional state entrains, or unites, our systems for thought, feeling, and action; shifts our concentration and energy toward support of our intellectual and creative forebrain (old mammalian and neocortex); and allows us to both learn and remember easily. In very young children, the primary caregiver’s emotional state determines the child’s state, and therefore the child’s development in general. Any kind of negative response, any form of fear or anger shifts our attention and energy from verbal-intellectual brain to our oldest survival brain. This shift shortchanges our intellect, cripples our learning and memory, and can lock our neocortex into service of our lower brain." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"To teach is to learn twice." - Joseph Joubert
"Successful writers learn at last what they should learn at first - to be intelligently simple." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the good ness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life." - Kahlil Gibran
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"It goes somehow against the grain to learn that cost-benefit analyses can be done neatly on lakes, meadows, nesting gannets, even whole oceans. It is hard enough to confront the environmental options ahead, and the hard choices, but even harder when the price tags are so visible. Even the new jargon is disturbing: it hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on." - Lewis Thomas
"There are three classes of people in the world. The first learn from their own experience - these are wise; the second learn from the experiences of others - these are the happy; the third neither learn from their own experience nor the experience of others - these are fools." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"The journey is difficult, immerse. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know." - Loren Eiseley
"All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"The degree to which we can develop world community and thereby save our skins is going to depend primarily on the degree to which we human beings can learn to empty ourselves." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems because it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Failure is success if we learn from it." - Malcolm S. Forbes, fully Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Sr.
"How good it would be if we could learn to be rigorous in judgment of ourselves, and gentle in our judgment of our neighbors! In remedying defects, kindness works best with others, sternness with ourselves. It is easy to make allowances for our faults, but dangerous; hard to make allowances for others’ faults, but wise." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Salvation is the only real success... God’s holiness is expressed in His love. Therefore love is wholeness, and to love is to fulfill - to fill full - God’s law, and be right all round. Learn then to love God and your brother and all things great and small. Life is our “chance of learning love.”" - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"One of the commonest mistakes and one of the costliest thinking that success is due to some genius, some magic - something or other which we do not possess. Success is generally due to holding one, and failure to letting go. You decide to learn a language, study music, take a course of reading, train yourself physically. Will it be success or failure? It depends upon how much pluck and perseverance that word “decide” contains. The decision that nothing can overrule, the grip that nothing can detach will bring success." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The meaning of life is that we love one another. The purpose of our lives, it seems to me, is to learn how to do that, so we can create a world where everyone’s in love with everyone all the time. That would be Heaven on earth." - Marianne Williamson
"Teaching is more difficult that learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, let nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information." - Martin Heidegger
"Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal flow." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"No matter how much we strive to understand, ultimate reality will always remain hidden? Only if the search for truth is motivated by the desire to reach an absolute answer. The person looking for certainty is bound to be disappointed... If on the other hand we realize that the partial truths we uncover are all legitimate aspects of the unknowable universe, then we can learn to enjoy the search and derive from it the pleasure one gets from any creative act... One must painstakingly match one’s preconceptions against actual, ongoing experience to begin separating truth from illusion." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"It is impossible to learn the art of poetry second-hand. Poetic inspiration comes only from the depths of the soul." - Moses ibn Ezra, fully Rabbi Moses ben Jacob ibn Ezra, known as ha-Sallah "Writer of penitential prayers"
"Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything." - Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.
"If you do not learn from your mistakes, you might just as well not make them." - Napoleon Hill
"No man can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure." - Noah Porter, fully Noah Porter, Jr.
"You learn by trying out ideas, and hearing reactions to them, and hearing what other people have to say about the topic, and formulating programs, and trying to pursue them, and seeing where they break down, and getting some experience, and so on." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky
"The way a book is read - which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book - can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts in it. Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully." - Norman Cousins
"Sharpen your thinking about goal setting. Be realistic about the amount of time and effort that might be necessary. Make a commitment to excellence. Learn to distinguish between a goal and a wish. Prepare for ultimate goals by achieving your interim goals. Choose goals that will benefit others as well as yourself." - Norman Vincent Peale
"When pain strikes, we often ask the wrong questions, such as, Why me? The right questions are, What can I learn from this? What can I do about it? What can I accomplish in spite of it?" - Norman Vincent Peale
"The best way to learn anything is by doing." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Don’t do things the wrong way. Learn the right way. It’s easier because it’s right." - Norman Vincent Peale
"The first person one must learn to love is oneself. If you do not love yourself, and by that is meant respect and esteem for your own self, you will not be able to love anyone else." - Norman Vincent Peale
"A boy will learn more true wisdom in a public school in a year than a private education in five. It is not from masters, but from their equals, that youth learn a knowledge of the world." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Filial obedience is the first and greatest requisite of a state; by this we become good subjects to our emperors, capable of behaving with just subordination to our superiors, and grateful dependents on heaven; by this we become fonder of marriage, in order to be capable of exacting obedience from other sin our turn; by this we become good magistrates, for early submission is the truest lesson to those who would learn to rule. By this the whole state may be said to resemble one family." - Oliver Goldsmith
"I know of no teachers so powerful and persuasive as the little army of specialists. They carry no banners, they beat no drums; but where they are men learn that bustle and push are not the equals of quiet genius and serene mastery." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"We’re here - to learn to love in spite of the human condition, to transcend the human condition of being fearful. We get so bogged down in worldly things we don’t understand that we’re here for a spiritual quest. Understanding that this journey is the most exciting part of being human has revolutionized my life." - Oprah Winfrey, born Oprah Gail Winfrey
"Even while striving to improve yourself, learn to stand alone, secure in your own virtues and self-worth. If you want others to believe in you, remember, it isn’t only your words that have an effect, but what you are and what you feel within - what is in your soul." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"At death, you forget all the limitations of the physical body, and realize how free you are... You exist apart from the mortal body... There is nothing to fear. When death comes, laugh at it. Death is only an experience through which you are meant to learn a great lesson: you cannot die. Our real self, the soul, is immortal. We may sleep for a little while in that change called death, but we can never be destroyed. We exist, and that existence is eternal... Nothing can terminate the eternal consciousness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first...when you learn to live for others, they will live for you." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh