This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Religion in the deepest sense takes shape as we learn through pain and loss that the creativity we exercise over our lives is finite, a mere participation in a greater creative act." - Thomas Moore
"It is the faith that is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate borders." - Vannevar Bush
"Philosopher, lover of wisdom, that is to say, of truth. All philosophers have had this dual character; there is not one in antiquity who has not given mankind examples of virtue and lessons in moral truths. They have all contrived to be deceived about natural philosophy; but natural philosophy is so little necessary for the conduct of life, that the philosophers had no need of it. It has taken centuries to learn a part of nature’s laws. One day was sufficient for a wise man to learn the duties of man." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone." - William Hazlitt
"Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest, ride more than thou goest, learn more than thou trowest, set less than thou throwest; leave thy drink and thy whore, and keep in-adoor, and thou shalt have more than two tens to a score. King Lear (Fool at Act i, Scene 4)" - William Shakespeare
"You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"Every moment can be viewed as new... You cause yourself a great loss by not living in the present... Don’t let the past weigh you down... Realize what is over is over... The future is always an unknown entity so learn to focus on the present... Learn to concentrate on what you are presently doing... Always try to utilize your present moments for growth... If you master feeling joy in your present moments, you need never be concerned you are missing anything, since whatever you are engaged in can be transformed into an elevating experience... You can alleviate pain by living in the present." - Zelig Pliskin
"Regardless of how you have viewed events in the past, you have the ability to learn to view things with a calm and peaceful attitude. Instead of looking at events and situations as overwhelming, you can look at them as interesting and challenging experiences. Give up your demands of how you would have like anything to be and deal with what actually is." - Zelig Pliskin
"What is reality? The simple picture before your eyes. Your emotional reaction, however, is based entirely on the way you personally perceived the situation... Facts themselves are neutral. You do not have emotional reactions to facts. Your emotional reaction is always based on your subjective evaluation of any situation... Learn to differentiate between facts, inferences, and value judgments. Facts do not make you happy or sad. It is only your value judgments that do." - Zelig Pliskin
"If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him." - Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer
"I believe marriage to be the best and most important relation that can exist between two human beings. If it has not often been realized hitherto, that is chiefly because husband and wife have regarded themselves as each other’s policeman. If marriage is to achieve its possibilities, husbands and wives must learn to understand that whatever the law may say, in their private lives they must be free." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"Too often we act - ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we're giving them children who have, you know, they're not ready to learn. And if they're not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they're behind. " - Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell
"We must learn that competence is better than extravagance, that worth is better than wealth, that the golden calf we have worshipped has no more brains than that one of old which the Hebrews worshipped. So beware of money and money’s worth as the supreme passion of the mind. Beware of the craving for enormous acquisition." - Cyrus Augustus Bartol
"What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves, the meaning of wholeness." - David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
"Since the mind is a specific biocomputer, it needs specific instructions and directions. The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, learn about them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them." - Denis E. Waitley
"It is the worst of madness to learn what has to be unlearnt." - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
"You live and learn. At any rate, you live." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Children learn what they live. If children live with criticism,they learn to condemn. If children live with hostility, they learn to fight. If children live with fear,they learn to be apprehensive. If children live with pity,they learn to feel sorry for themselves. If children live with ridicule, they learn to be shy. If children live with jealousy,they learn what envy is. If children live with shame,they learn to feel guilty. If children live with tolerance,they learn to be patient. If children live with encouragement,they learn to be confident. If children live with praise,they learn to appreciate. If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves. If children live with acceptance, they learn to find love in the world. If children live with recognition, they learn to have a goal. If children live with sharing, they learn to be generous. If children live with honesty and fairness, they learn what truth and justice are. If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and those around them. If children live with friendliness, they learn that the world is a nice place in which to live. If children live with serenity, they learn to have a peace of mind. With what are your children living? " -
"Children learn what they live. If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. If children live with hostility, they learn to fight. If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive. If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves. If children live with ridicule, they learn to be shy. If children live with jealousy, they learn what envy is. If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty. If children live with tolerance, they learn to be patient. If children live with encouragement, they learn to be confident. If children live with praise, they learn to appreciate. If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves. If children live with acceptance, they learn to find love in the world. If children live with recognition, they learn to have a goal. If children live with sharing, they learn to be generous. If children live with honesty and fairness, they learn what truth and justice are. If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and those around them. If children live with friendliness, they learn that the world is a nice place in which to live. If children live with serenity, they learn to have a peace of mind. With what are your children living?" - Dorothy Law Nolte
"We cannot know how much we learn from those who never will return, until a flash of unforeseen remembrance falls on what has been." - Edwin Arlington Robinson
"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections? " - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
"It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you." - Erik Erickson
"You must learn day by day, year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens. " - Ethel Barrymore
"The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. " - Eugen Herrigel
"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
"Life is simply time given to man to learn how to live. Mistakes are always part of learning. The real dignity of life consists in cultivating a fine attitude towards our own mistakes and those of others. It is the fine tolerance of a fine soul. Man becomes great, not through never making mistakes, but by profiting by those he does make; by being satisfied with a single rendition of a mistake, not encoring it into a continuous performance; by getting from it the honey of new, regenerating inspiration with no irritating sting of morbid regret; by building better to-day because of his poor yesterday; and by rising with renewed strength, finer purpose and freshened courage every time he falls." - William George Jordan
"Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain." - Federico Fellini
"To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. … The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation. " - Freeman John Dyson
"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it." - Freeman John Dyson
"One must learn to love oneself... with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish. " - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"Be quick to learn and wise to know. " - George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum
"For the sake of humanity, it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefit of commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest; that the swords might be turned into ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, "the nations learn war no more."" - George Washington
"Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God. " - George Washington Carver
"The chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
"The more you test him, the slower he will learn and the less he'll want to do. The less you test him, the quicker he will learn and the more he'll want to learn. Knowledge is the most precious gift you can give your child. Give it as generously as you give him food." - Glenn Doman
"Quantum science suggests the existence of many possible futures for each moment of our lives, or, infinite possibilities. Each future remains dormant until awakened by choices made in the present. Isn't it important to learn to make the best possible choices?" - Gregg Braden
"There is a seeking out of the best in others, of that which is most ultimate in them, and exposing oneself to it, to learn from it and be made over by it, which brings friendship very close to the mood of prayer." - Gregory Vlastos
"Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying." - Gustave Flaubert