This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"For... what liberty is; there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he useth in his mind, that is, what he himself meaneth when he saith an action... is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be satisfied... that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external impediments. But to those that out of custom speak not what they conceive, but what they heard, and are not able, or will not take the pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument can be sufficient, because experience and matter of fact are not verified by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory." - Thomas Hobbes
"Most people think dramatically, not quantitatively." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Everyone has to think to be polite; the first impulse is to be impolite." - E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
"A dimension is missing from ourselves and our culture which is reflected in our inability to reconcile the competing demands of our inner and outer lives. As a result, most of us make use of a very small portion of our possible consciousness and of our soul’s resources... The destiny of mankind depends on something as personal and intimate as the way each one of us chooses to live, think and behave." - Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
"To meditate is to labor; to think is to act." - Victor Hugo
"An honor-seeker will not be a truth-seeker... Only if a person talks and acts according to his ideals, independently of what others think of him, will he gain the respect of others." - Yosef Y. Hurwitz
"Many people are mistaken about how they can improve their situation. They think they will have peace of mind only when they have obtained everything they desire. But this is erroneous. Gratifying desires does not bring lasting satisfaction. The only path to achieve satisfaction is to stop desiring more things. As long as a person is unable to control his desiring, his problems will not be overcome... The only way to find real satisfaction in life is to stop desiring what is beyond your reach." - Yosef Y. Hurwitz
"Most people tend to perform the actions that require least effort, to think the thoughts that are easiest, to feel the emotions that are most vulgarly commonplace, to give the rein to desires that are most nearly animal." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there’s a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Whenever, for any reason, we wish to think of the world, not as it appears to common sense, but as a continuum, we find that our traditional syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. Mathematicians have therefore been compelled to invent radically new symbol-systems for this express purpose. But the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in kind from the worlds to which traditional language and the languages of mathematics are adequate." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"A thing is important if anyone think it important." - William James
"In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering... A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices... the difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of cause." - William James
"In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters." - Anna Jameson
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." - Thomas Jefferson
"When you think to excuse, you accuse." - Saint Jerome, aka Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymous, Hierom or Jerom NULL
"No man should think that peace comes easily. Peace does not come by merely wanting it, or shouting for it, or marching down Main Street for it. Peace is built brick by brick, mortared by the stubborn effort and the total energy and imagination of able and dedicated men. And it is built in the living faith that, in the end, man can and will master his own destiny." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
"Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression. We have all felt the desire, at times almost victorious desire, to get away from everything and retire into a cottage in the wilderness. But we don't do it, because we are better men and women than we think we are." - Robert Willard Johnson
"Exert your talents and distinguish yourself, and don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark." -
"The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation." -
"We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL
"Live unconditionally and non-judgmentally, with a measure of humility - we can’t be taught anything new if we think we already know it all." - Gloria D. Karpinski
"We draw to ourselves what we really want, not what we think we want. It’s not a bad idea to ask ourselves now and then, Whose truth are we living? Whose dream are we dreaming?" - Gloria D. Karpinski
"A person’s first obligation is to work on having an orderly mind and to decide on what thoughts he will think about." - Ya’akov Dov "Katzele" Katz
"It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves." - Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
"One should not think slightly of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a love without feeling... The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
"In the last twenty years we have developed this treadmill mentality. We think that by always reaching higher, accomplishing more - more money, a better body, the perfect mate - that we will automatically be happy. That’s an illusion. All this reaching is just making us crazy. We need to rest." - Melvyn Kinder
"I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think." - Jacques Lacan, fully Jacques Marie Émile Lacan
"Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him." - Walter Savage Landor
"If he could only see how small a vacancy his death would leave, the proud man would think less of the place he occupies in his lifetime." - Ernest Legouvé, fully Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé
"But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God. And it is this in us that is called the rational soul or mind. It is also through the knowledge of necessary truths, and through their abstract expression, that we rise to acts of reflection, which make us think of what is called I, and observe that this or that is within us: and thus, thinking of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial, and of God Himself, conceiving that what is limited in us is in Him without limits." -
"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself." - Bruno Lessing, pseudonymn for Randolph Edgar Block
"People become so used to being unhappy they are unaware of the needless misery they cause themselves. They imprison themselves by filling their minds with thoughts of resentment, hatred, envy, and desires. It is amazing how they tolerate living such a life. The only reason they do tolerate it is because they have become so used to living with such thoughts they fell it is the normal picture of life. They mistakenly think it is impossible for life to be any different." - Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach
"Who is a righteous man and who is an evil man? Many people think a righteous man is one who does not transgress, and the evil person is one who constantly transgresses. But even the very righteous also transgress and even the very wicked perform good deeds. The essential difference between the two is that a righteous person tries to overcome his desires to do wrong and the evil person does not." - Yeruchem Levovitz, aka The Mashgiach
"Our whole life should speak forth our thankfulness; every condition and place we are in should be a witness to our thankfulness. This will make the times and places we live in better for us. When we ourselves are monuments of God’s mercy, it is fit we should be patterns of His praises, and leave monuments to others. We should think it given to us to do something better than to live in. We live not to live: our life is not the end of itself, but the praise of the giver." - Richard Sibbes
"I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday." - Abraham Lincoln
"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much." - Walter Lippmann
"I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate; or so much as self-evident, which every innate principle must needs be, and not need any proof to ascertain its truth, nor want any reason to gain its approbation." - John Locke
"The old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
"The thoughts you think will irradiate you as though you are a transparent vase." - Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible." - Nicolas Malebranche
"Be sure, when you think you are being extremely tactful, that you are not in reality running away from something you ought to face." - Frank Medlicott, fully Brigadier Frank Medlicott
"If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for." - Thomas Merton
"Vices are often hid under the name of virtue, and the practice of them followed by the worst consequences. I have seen ladies indulge their own ill-humor by being very rude and impertinent, and think they deserve approbation by saying, “I love to speak the truth.”" - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
"We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than our own. Man can in nothing fix and conform himself to his mere necessity. Of pleasure, wealth and power he grasps at more than he can hold; his greediness is incapable of moderation." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"We can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"We cannot think two thoughts at the same time. Consequently, when negative thoughts arise, you do not need to fight them. Make an effort to think positive thoughts, and the negative thoughts will disappear." - Nachman of Breslov, aka Reb Nachman Breslover or Bratslav, Nachman from Uman NULL
"Indignation is the seducer of thought. No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched." - George Jean Nathan