This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, the variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, the love of nature seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"To light a candle is to cast a shadow." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
"Self-confidence is not pride. Just the contrary: only a person or a nation that is self-confident, in the best sense of the word, is capable of listening to others, accepting them as equals, forgiving its enemies and regretting its own guilt." - Václav Havel
"What is needed in politics is not the ability to lie but rather the sensibility to know when, where, how, and to whom to say things." - Václav Havel
"Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all." - Václav Havel
"A man is not the sum total of what he thinks in his head and does with his hands, but what he is in his heart." - Vance Havner
"Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world." - Vannevar Bush
"The world is a living image of God." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Life can only take place in the present moment. If we lose the present moment, we lose life." - Tripitaka or Tipitaka NULL
"Imperfect knowledge is the parent of doubt: thorough and honest research dispels it." - Tryon Edwards
"Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. - They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. - They do not realize that "we always weaken what we exaggerate."" - Tryon Edwards
"Thoughts lead on to purpose, purpose leads on to actions, actions form habits, habits decide character, and character fixes our destiny." - Tryon Edwards
"A stupid friend is a greater plague than a wise enemy." - Turkish Proverbs
"One who handles honey, licks his fingers. (Meaning: Somebody in charge of handling money or resources, get to keep or enjoy some benefits for himself.)" - Turkish Proverbs
"The Devil interferes with hurried work. (Meaning: If you hurry your work it will turn out wrong.)" - Turkish Proverbs
"You don't hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news." - Thomas J. Watson, fully Thomas John Watson, Sr.
"But if NATO’s only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ”cleansing” Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"The next six months in Iraq — which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there — are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time." - Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent." - Thomas Love Peacock
"In contemporary America [mental health] has come to mean conformity to the demands of society. According to the commonsense definition, mental health is the ability to play the game of social living, and to play it well. Conversely, mental illness is the refusal to play, or the inability to play well." - Thomas Szasz, fully Thomas Stephen Szasz
"We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for the building up of private power. United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves—to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude" - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"If I tell you my dream, you might forget it. If I act on my dream, perhaps you will remember it, but if I involve you, it becomes your dream too." - Tibetan Proverbs
"All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
"To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly." - Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
"A fourth rule for constructing sentences with proper strength is to make the members of them go on rising and growing in their importance above one another. This sort of arrangement is called a climax, and is always considered as a beauty in composition." - Hugh Blair
"You can rest assured that if you devote your time and attention to the highest advantage of others, the Universe will support you, always and in the nick of time." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"Repeat anything often enough and it will start to become you." - Tom Hopkins
"Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"Equality is not in regarding different things similarly; equality is in regarding different things differently." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid — but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins
"As by your high imperial majesty I had in charge at my depart for France, as procurator to your excellence, to marry Princess Margaret for your grace, so, in the famous ancient city Tours, in presence of the Kings of France and Sicil, the Dukes of Orleans, Calabar, Bretagne, and Alencon, seven earls, twelve barons, and twenty reverend bishops, I have performed my mask and was espoused. Henry VI, Act I, Scene 1" - William Shakespeare
"But I pray you, let none of your people stir me. I have an exposition of sleep come upon me." - William Shakespeare
"Come, come, good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used. Exclaim no more against it. Othello the Moor of Venice (Iago at II, iii)" - William Shakespeare
"There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; my philosophy is kindness." - Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso NULL
"One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats." - Iris Murdoch, aka Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
"Imagination is the poor man’s wormhole. We can't do what we'd really like to do -- namely, travel through time, pay a visit to our future selves, and see how happy those selves are -- and so we imagine the future instead of actually going there. But if we cannot travel in the dimension of time, we can travel in the dimensions of space, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere in those other three dimensions there is another human being who is actually experiencing the event that we are merely thinking about." - Daniel Gilbert, fully Daniel Todd Gilbert, aka Professor Happiness
"I want a full and thorough investigation of this, and then we will issue the report publicly, ... We want to be transparent about this, and we are cooperating fully with the NCAA." - William Harvey
"He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?" - William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
"Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention. . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them." - William James
"Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed." - William James