This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If you would know a man, first learn to love him." - Austin O'Malley
"We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves." - Eugene O'Neill, fully Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
"Each of us has to learn that it's no true gift to have another say: "Beside you, nobody else matters -" since the only tribute to be trusted in life is, in the end, the one that means: "Because of you, all others in some way matter more."" - Doris Peel
"It is safer to learn than teach; and who conceals his opinion has nothing to answer for." - William Penn
"Be patient in little things. Learn to bear the every-day trials and annoyances of life quietly and calmly, and then, when unforeseen trouble or calamity comes, your strength will not forsake you. There is much difference between genuine patience and sullen endurance, as between the smile of love, and the malicious gnashing of the teeth." - William Swan Plumer
"A noble part of every true life is to learn to undo what has been wrongly done. A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser to-day that he was yesterday." - Alexander Pope
"He, who has no inclination to learn more, will be very apt to think that he knows enough." - John Powell
"It is well to learn caution by the misfortunes of others." - Publius Syrus
"Teachers learn from their students' discussions." - Rashi, born Shlomo ben Yitzchok, aka Salomon Isaacides, Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki NULL
"Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves." - Theodor Reik
"I learn much from those who do not practice what they preach." - J. H. Rhodes, fully John Harold Rhodes
"The mature man knows that he is likely to make mistakes. He wants to take responsibility for them. Only by facing his mistakes does he learn to act more responsibly." - Richard H. Rice, fully Richard Henry Rice
"Education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things. Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"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." -
"The lessons we learn from our mistakes are a great light." - Yisroel Salanter Lipkin
"Who is wise? The man who can learn something from every man. Who is strong? The man who overcomes his passion. Who is rich? The man who is content with his fate. Whom do men honor? The man who honors his fellow man." - Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot or Pirqe Aboth) NULL
"Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals." - Albert Schweitzer
"Psychotherapy is a process in which you will learn to contain your pain until the weight of it collapses into insight." - Michael Solomon
"It is certainly a very important lesson, to learn how to enjoy ordinary things, and to be able to relish your being, without the transport of some passion, or the gratification of some appetite." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
"We learn to do neither by thinking nor by doing; we learn to do by thinking about what we are doing." - George D. Stoddard
"The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes." -
"The infant is born in the same universe where lives the adult of ripe mind. But its position is not like a schoolboy who has yet to learn his alphabet, finding himself in a college class. The infant has it own joy of life because the world is not a mere road, but a home, of which it will have more and more as it grows up in wisdom. With our road that gain is at every step, for it is the road and the home in one; it leads us on yet gives us shelter." -
"Unless you learn to control your desires for things you lack, your entire life will be full of pain and suffering. Even an extremely wealthy person will always find some new thing to desire." - Menachem Taryash
"Without humility you will not learn even the simplest lessons of life." - John Thompson, published under pseudonymn Bysshe Vanolis
"When we learn to give thanks, we are learning to concentrate not on the bad things, but on the good things in our lives." - Amy Vanderbilt
"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." -
"Too many follow example rather than precept; but it is safer to learn rather from precept than example. Man a wise teacher does not follow his own teaching; for it is easier to say, do this, than to do it. If then I see good doctrine with an evil life, though I pity the last, I will follow the first. Good sayings belong to all; evil actions only to their authors." - Arthur Warwick
"Look at our present life circumstances, whatever they may be, as the raw material of our learning... We must stop regarding ourselves as victims of circumstances, and start to acknowledge that we are not here purely by accident. The master within is trying to help us wake up by confronting us with our current life situation, which contains all the lessons we need to learn in order to grow into more fully developed human beings." - John Welwood
"Let's learn and label properly Disappointment and Discouragement for what they are - two completely different states of mind. Disappointment can be a spur to improvement that will contribute to success. But Discouragement is a mortal enemy that destroys courage and robs one of the will to fight. It is not circumstance that causes Discouragement, but one's own reaction to that circumstance. Everyone must meet Disappointment, many times; it is simply a part of life. When it is met, we may resign ourselves to Discouragement and failure. Or we may recognize each Disappointment as an asset by which we can profit, and take new strength from a lesson learned. The choice is ours, each time, to make." - John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson
"Giving of yourself, learning to be tolerant, giving recognition and approval to others, remaining flexible enough to mature and learn - yields happiness, harmony, contentment and productivity. These are the qualities of a rich life, the bounteous harvest of getting along with people." - Jack C. Yewell
"We grow because we struggle, we learn and overcome." - R. C. Allen, fully Robert Cameron Allen
"It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself." - John H. Aughey, fully John Hill Aughey
"How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire
"The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a very great deal to teach them." - Arnold Bennett, fully Enoch Thomas Arnold Bennett
"Children who have been taught, or conditioned, to listen passively most of the day to the warm verbal communication coming from the TV screen, to the deep emotional appeal of the so-called TV personality, are often unable to respond to real persons because they arouse so much less feeling than the skilled actor. Worse, they lose the ability to learn from reality because life experiences are more complicated than the ones they see on the screen, and there is no one who comes in at the end to explain it all. The “TV child”... gets discouraged when he cannot grasp the meaning of what happens to him.... If, later in life, this block of solid inertia is not removed, the emotional isolation from others that starts in front of TV may continue... This being seduced into passivity and discouraged about facing life actively on one’ sown is the real danger of TV." - Bruno Bettelheim
"They shall beat their swords into plough shares and their spears into pruning hooks; nations shall not lift up a sword against nations, neither shall they learn war any more." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated." -
"We may learn from children how large a part of our grievances is imaginary. But the pain is just as real." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we must upon it." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"Many earnest persons, who have found direct education for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare that they first began to learn when they began to teach, and that in education of others they discovered the secret of their own." - Gamaliel Bradford