This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better for the future." - William Wordsworth
"Our task as we grow older in a rapidly advancing science, is to retain the capacity of joy in discoveries which correct older ideas, and to learn from our pupils as we teach them." - Hans Zinnser
"People who lead fulfilling lives generally have found a sense of “home” in what they do. They have a philosophy of life that connects them to a larger vision. They accept that life is a continuing challenge. More often than not, they are able to live according to their own schedules, choosing work that is interesting and complex enough to keep them engaged. They get excited about being effective and about being stretched to learn new things. They have a few good friends who understand their vision and perhaps even share common aspirations. They are not driven by urgency, competition, or the demands of the ego." - Carol Adrienne
"If the meaning of life is not a mystery, if leading meaningful lives is within the power of all of us, then we do not need to ask the question `What’s it all about?’ in despair. We can look around us and see the many ways in which life can be meaningful. We can see the value of happiness while accepting that it is not everything, which will make it easier for us at those times when it eludes us. We can learn to appreciate the pleasure of life without becoming slaves to appetites which can never be satisfied. We can see the value of success, while not interpreting that too narrowly, so that we can appreciate the project of striving to become what we want to be as well as the more visible, public signs of success. We can see the value of seizing the day, without leading us into a desperate scramble to grasp the ungraspable moment. We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives, too, without thinking that altruism demands everything we have. And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all." - Julian Baggini
"Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure." - Kenneth Boulding, fully Kenneth Ewart Boulding
"Prayer is not a vain attempt to change God’s will: it is a filial desire to learn God’s will and share it. Prayer is not a substitute for work: it is the secret spring and indispensable ally of all true work – the clarifying of work’s goal, the purifying of its motives, and the renewing of its zeal." - George Arthur Buttrick
"We who are charged with announcing the message of Christ need to learn the incomparable lesson that he taught us by his own example. He taught irst of all with his life, and only then did he preach." - Hélder Câmara, fully Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara
"You must learn to make every act count." - Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda
"When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"When we live at each other’s mercy, we had better learn to be merciful." - William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
"If people could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"You can learn a lot from people who view the world differently than you do." - Anthony J. D'Angelo
"Tiny children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun." - Glenn Doman
"It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. Otherwise, he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community." - Albert Einstein
"Perhaps some day, the modern man will learn that mystery is not the prison of the mind of man, it is his home." - Walter Farrell
"God, the Ground of Being, the Spirit Creator of all being, creates because he is love. Therefore he creates finite persons who are spirits, but have being, that they might learn to love. To learn to love man needs genuine self-being, genuine freedom; therefore man is put in an indirect relation to God within a pedagogical process where he can go his own partial, rebellious and faithless way until he discover, through fear and frustration, indeed through all the opposite experiences from Love, that God’s way, the way of love, is alone in accordance with man’s deepest nature and alone can satisfy his deepest needs." - Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré
"Do we not learn from suffering? Yes, often; and some people will learn only in that way; but we still learn by overcoming and not by encouraging or accepting the negative thing. The man who accepts his trouble “with resignation” is not learning; he is steeping himself in more error." - Emmet Fox
"We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about the 'unthinkable things' because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless." - J. W. Fulbright, fully James William Fulbright
"Blaming the wolf would not help the sheep much. The sheep must learn not to fall into the clutches of the wolf." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble our selves, we would learn not from the grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The lower animals are our brethren. I include among them the lion and the tiger. We do not know how to live with these carnivorous beasts and poisonous reptiles because of our ignorance. When man learns better, he will learn to befriend even these. Today he does not even know how to befriend a man of a different religion or from a different country." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum total of that life is God. Hence the necessity of realizing God living within every one of us… The instrument of this knowledge is boundless, selfless service." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction." - Malcolm Gladwell
"We must learn to understand each other and listen without judgment, to learn from each other and not be dismissive of what we don’t understand." - David Green
"Character is distilled out of our daily confrontation with temptation, out of our regular response to the call of duty. It is formed as we learn to cherish principles and to submit to self-discipline. Character is the sum total of all the little decisions, the small deeds, the daily reactions to the choices that confront us. Character is not obtained instantly. We have to mold and hammer and forge ourselves into character. It is a distant goal to which there is no shortcut." - Sidney Greenberg
"`Tis better to have tried in vain sincerely striving for a goal, than to have lived upon the plain an idle and timid soul. `Tis better to have fought and spent your courage, missing all applause, than to have lived in smug content and never ventured for a cause. For he who tries and fails may be the founder of a better day; though never his the victory, form him shall others learn the way." - Edgar Albert Guest, aka Eddie Guest
"Children who are not spoken to by… responsive adults will not learn to speak properly. Children who are not answered will stop asking questions. They will become incurious. And children who are not told stories and who are not read to will have few reasons for wanting to learn to read." - Gail E Haley
"It is often much more difficult to learn from victory than from defeat. In defeat, questions are asked abut what went wrong, so that those mistakes will not be made in the future. But victory seldom creates the need to inquire as to its sources." - Gary Hart, born Gary Warren Hartpence
"The evolution of consciousness requires a wide range of opportunities and a playing field that affords almost unlimited options for development. If human life represents a learning process, then society is the ideal school that affords an extremely wide range of options for numerous levels of consciousness to develop, progress, define, identify, and grasp endless subtleties as well as learn more gross lessons. The ego is extremely tenacious and therefore often seems to require extreme conditions before it lets go of a positionality. It often takes the collective experience of millions of people over many centuries to learn even what appears upon examination to be a simple and obvious truth, namely, that peace is better than war or love is better than hate." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"The secret of happiness is only a few words; yet we will not accept it from anyone, but must learn it from a lifetime of experience, when it is far too late." - Mohammad Ḥejāzi, Moḥammad Moṭiʿ-Al-Dawla
"Neither existing nor evolving is a purpose – these are simply states of affairs. Demonstrating a trend toward complexity does not demonstrate purpose – it demonstrates only what happens when something new is added to something old. Nor does the ability to learn then apply what has been learned prove that life has a purpose." - David Hockey
"Embrace all situations as opportunities to learn." - Peter W. Jedlicka
"Failure is an opportunity to learn from your and other’s mistakes. But if you always blame others, there is no end to blaming." - Peter W. Jedlicka
"In the process of becoming educated we learn from each other and, in so doing, we destroy the barriers that separate us from one another; we demolish prejudices that impede us from becoming fully human." - Francisco Jiménez
"He that hopes hereafter to look back with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught." - Aidan Kavanaugh
"Experience is connected to myth. Being immersed in self-experience is living one’s own myth, one’s own life story… As our connectedness to living depends, we learn that experience is the teacher. And experience cannot be programmed. We are our own mythmakers, knowingly or unknowingly." - Stanley Keleman
"The Bible is the record of man’s efforts to find God and learn how to live in harmony with his laws." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Our children may learn about heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves architects of the future." - Jomo Kenyatta
"Darwin’s and Huxley’s picture of man’s place in the universe prepared the way for the Holocaust… Darwin the scientist directly inspired Nietzsche’s superman theory and the Nazi corollary that some people were subhuman… People have to learn to stop thinking of other people as machines and learn to think of them as men and women possessed of souls… History doesn’t need another one hundred million deaths to prove that scientific atheism is a form of mental illness." - John Koster
"All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power. If you want to govern people, you must place yourself below them. If you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"Inevitably we learn through changing our perspectives. Consideration of life against the background of death brings its wonder and mystery to the surface." - Stephen Larsen, fully H. Stephen Larsen