This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim." - William James
"Think upon the vanity and shortness of human life, and let death and eternity be often in your minds." - William Law
"A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows." - William (Morley Punshon) McFee
"If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris
"Skip dominates most conversations in a negotiation and nobody questions the veracity of what he's saying it's the world according to Skip," - William Morris
"So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last forever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die." - William Morris
"The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with the feeling." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Our Italy Shines o'er with civil swords; Sextus Pompeius Makes his approaches to the port of Rome; Equality of two domestic powers Breeds scrupulous faction; the hated, grown to strength, Are newly grown to love; the condemned Pompey, Rich in this father's honor, creeps apace Into the hearts of such as have not thrived Upon the present state, whose numbers threaten; And quietness, grown sick of rest, would purge By any desperate change." - William Shakespeare
"An answer if profitable in proportion to the intensity of the quest." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Man proposes, God disposes." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Your body is the temple of knowledge." - Egyptian Proverbs
"Sometimes ... yaralanıveririz so suddenly. But every wound will heal itself. Eventually heals, top off. Stored in the eyes. Does not want to be seen because there is no wound. As long as they advocate the wound pupils. Because if pupils are injured, you cannot look the world in the same way ever again. You start to see the bad side of everything you look at. Contaminants that have remained hidden even run away from his eyes. Did not see things that other people feel the same anymore and you do not love them anymore. Uncomfortable. They cannot look you in the same way again. This is close to you, so no one wants to see. Picture the same image, in fact, changing your eyes. If you walk out the picture, everything remains as before, not everyone is comfortable. Personally, I think it is best to go in such situations. Top go to the top. Out of spite." - Elif Safak
"Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline." - Elihu Root
"You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word." - Elizabeth Bibesco
"Rather let my head Stoop to the block than these knees bow to any Save to the God of heaven and to my king." - William Shakespeare
"But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I want to explore the art of pleasure in Italy, the art of devotion in India and, in Indonesia, the art of balancing the two. It was only later, after admitting this dream, that I noticed the happy coincidence that all these countries begin with the letter I. A fairly auspicious sign, it seemed, on a voyage of self-discovery." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I want to learn how to speak Italian. For years, I'd wished I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I’d been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I’d been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion…well, surely there was a way to learn that trick." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women as to see themselves in a relationship of connection…I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein that have quietly buried in many neat rows– the personal dreams they have given up for their families…(Women) have a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. The cold ugly fact is that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. From studies, married men perform dazzingly better in life, live longer, accumulate more, excel at careers, report to be happier, less likely to die from a violent death, suffer less from alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression than single man…The reverse is not true. In fact, every fact is reverse, single women fare much better than married women. On average, married women take a 7% pay cut. All of this adds up to what Sociologists called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance…It is important to pause here and inspect why so women long for it (marriage) so deeply." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"You love new boyfriend? I think so. Yes. Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice, staying strong, instead." - Elizabeth Gilbert
"Mountain gorses, do ye teach us . . . that the wisest word man reaches is the humblest he can speak?" - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"I thought that prattling boys and girls would fill this empty room; that my rich heart would gather flowers From childhood's opening bloom. One child and two green graves are mine, this is God's gift to me; a bleeding, fainting, broken heart— This is my gift to Thee." - Elizabeth Payson Prentiss
"It is easy to convince a man who thinks as you do." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"Too much principle is often more harmful than too little." - Ellen Glasgow, fully Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
"A life of kindness is the primary meaning of divine worship." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us." - Emile Gaboriau
"And from the midst of cheerless gloom I passed to bright unclouded day." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arm's length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?" - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"With wide-embracing love Thy Spirit animates eternal years, pervades and broods above, changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and moon were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and Thou wert left alone, every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death, nor atom that his might could render void: Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, and what Thou art may never be destroyed." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land." - Emma Goldman
"The forgiveness of sins is the central problem of life. Sin is a sense of separation from God, and is the major tragedy of human experience. It is, of course, rooted in selfishness. It is essentially an attempt to gain some supposed good to which we are not entitled in justice. It is a sense of isolated, self-regarding, personal existence, whereas the Truth of Being is that all is One. Our true selves are at one with God, undivided from Him, expressing His ideas, witnessing to His nature--the dynamic Thinking of that Mind. Because we are all one with the great Whole of which we are spiritually a part, it follows that we are one with all men. Just because in Him we live and move and have our being, we are, in the absolute sense, all essentially one." - Emmet Fox
"The law of circulation is a Cosmic Law. That means that it is true everywhere and on all planes. The law is that constant rhythmical movement is necessary to health and harmony. Now the opposite of circulation is congestion, and it may be said that all sickness, in harmony, or trouble of any kind is really due to some form of congestion. If you think this subject out for yourself you will be fascinated to find how generally true it is, and in what unexpected places it appears. Much ill health is due to emotional congestion. This leads to congestion of the nerve, blood, and lymphatic fluids, producing disease. The depression belief under which the country labored for ten years was a case of congestion. There was plenty of raw material, machinery, and skill, and a very wide- spread demand for goods; but a case of congestion occurred! The dust bowl trouble and its allied misfortune, the floods, is, of course, an example of congestion. War itself is really due to frustrated circulation on many planes of existence. Some students of metaphysics shut their minds to the reception of new truth, and this always produces mental congestion and a failure to demonstrate. You should treat yourself two or three times a week for free circulation on all planes-by claiming that God is bringing this about." - Emmet Fox
"You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working." - Emmet Fox
"Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." - English Proverbs
"The higher the voice the smaller the intellect. " - Ernest Newman
"Men were designed for short, nasty, brutal lives. Women are designed for long, miserable ones." - Estelle R. Ramey, born Stella Rosemary Rubin
"An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second-best. Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man's tragic destiny: he must desÂperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the uniÂverse; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible conÂtribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else." - Ernest Becker