This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert … a man with a machine and inadequate culture … is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold." - Wendell Berry
"The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality." - Wendell Berry
"Let us then consider rather the incessant Now of the traveler through time, his tired mind biased towards bigness since his body must exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
"Each person’s unconscious uses symbols quite universally when addressing the Trans-personal aspects of one’s Being. Everyone will project his or her own unconscious material into such material (including me) which makes for an even richer process for each dream interpreter and dreamer. We want to project into a dream to catch glimpses of what wants to become conscious in the interpreter and in the dreamer. The vast majority of dreams address the Soul and Its journey through life and not the Ego’s perception of the journey." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"If we are to appreciate the inner dynamics we don't need to change them or judge them. There is wisdom in each of the dynamics observed. To determine what you think should happen is placing the ego in charge of the show. When the deep beingness seeks a change you will know it. Otherwise the wisdom is to put oneself in accord with the Mystery. This is hard for anyone with degrees of control issues." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"Illness comes from living too small a process or too large a process." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?" - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
"It is leadership's responsibility to give detailed specifications. Train people until they are in statistical control (until they are achieving as much as they can within the limits of the system you are using). Create teams that develop an esprit. Make personal self-improvement a company goal." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
"The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable." - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
"What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?" - W. Edwards Deming, fully William Edwards Deming
"The topics and treatment of the mathematics syllabus should be determined by the following principles: a. The course must be enjoyable and generate steadily increasing enthusiasm in the pupils, b. It should develop independence and activity of mind, curiosity, observation, and confidence, c. It should make pupils familiar with the basic ideas and processes of mathematics." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake." - Wallace Stevens
"A new challenge awaits us at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to go beyond fragmentation, to go beyond the incompatible sets of values held even by serious-minded people, to mature beyond the self-righteousness of one’s accepted approaches and be open to total living and total revolution. In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success. There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation." - Vimala Thakar
"We have moved very far away from love in our collective lives, dangerously near destruction, close to starvation. Perhaps we have the wisdom now, the awareness that love is as essential to human beings as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Love is the beauty, the delicate mystery, the soul of life, the radiant unspoiled purity that brings spontaneous joy, songs of ecstasy, poems, paintings, dances, dramas to celebrate its indescribable, never-to-be-fully-captured bliss of being. Can we bring love into the marketplaces, into the homes, the schools, the places of business, and transform them completely? You may call it a utopian challenge, but it is the only one that will make a significant difference or that is fully worthy of the potential of whole human beings." - Vimala Thakar
"We will discover that there are systems and structures that inevitably lead to aggression, exploitation, and war. We have accepted aggression as a way of living. We create and entrench ourselves in structures which culminate in wars. Retaining the structures and avoiding wars is not possible. You and I as individuals have to realize how we are responsible, how we cooperate with the systems and thereby participate in the violence and wars. And then we must begin to inquire whether we can discontinue cooperating with the systems, whether we can stop participating in wars, and explore alternative ways of living for ourselves." - Vimala Thakar
"I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"The only thing to do was to pelt him with sugared almonds." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
"Don’t try to be spiritual. That is only a word in the dictionary. Make it your goal to become a normally functioning individual. Let these principles shape you according to your real nature of a simple, decent, honest, unafraid human being." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Only noise makes mistakes. Silence never makes mistakes." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The mercy we need is self-mercy, which consists of ceasing to behave badly while justifying it." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"The only difference in sleeping people is the way they snore." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard
"Meaning is different from explanation and it certainly isn’t blame (no shame no blame really helps with seeing clearly, no?) I asked, “What is the cancer trying to tell me?” What is the story of this tumor? How does it fit into the narrative of my life?” The cancer seemed sweet to me. Well meaning. It was trying to hold all the undigested feelings and experiences I had raced right past in my headstrong, headlong race to save the world. She (the tumor felt like a little girl) became beloved. I owned her as my creation – not as my fault but as my perfectly crafted, unconscious, possibly deadly solution to the complex equation of my life. In one bundle it took on the world’s toxicity and my own reaction to it." - Vicki Robin
"By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl
"Hardly anyone loves the Lord's Name; how rare is that place which is in bloom." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Says Nanak, the Truth has been revealed to me. The Guru has given me the treasure; I have taken it and enshrined it within my heart." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Poles are able to reflect their history, they respect it. Who knows if anybody will remember when we commemorate our 25 years [since the 1989 Velvet Revolution]." - Václav Havel
"You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it." - Václav Havel
"We are not greatly pleased that our friends should respect our good qualities if they venture to perceive our faults." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"The best rules of rhetoric are, to speak intelligently; speak from the heart; have something to say; say it; and stop when you've done." - Tryon Edwards
"The village one can see requires no guide." - Turkish Proverbs
"Who has no intention to pray has no ears for the call to prayer." - Turkish Proverbs
"On the whole it may be observed, that the specific use of a body of unproductive consumers, is to give encouragement to wealth by maintaining such a balance between produce and consumption as will give the greatest exchangeable value to the results of the national industry." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization." - Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
"Our constitution is named a democracy, because it is in the hands not of the few but of the many. But our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes, and our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every branch of achievement, not for any sectional reason but on grounds of excellence alone. And as we give free play to all in our public life, so we carry the same spirit into our daily relations with one another. . . . Open and friendly in our private intercourse, in our public acts we keep strictly within the control of law. We acknowledge the restraint of reverence; we are obedient to whomsoever is set in authority, and to the laws, more sepecially to those which offer protection to the oppressed and those unwritten ordinances whose transgression brings admitted shame." - Thucydides NULL
"I've got billions of sparrows to worry about as well as everything else'. So there's the whole idea that whatever it is that you believe, it can never be valid unless you have some consensus reality demonstration." - Todd Rundgren, fully Todd Harry Rundgren
"Let us ask ourselves seriously and honestly, “What do I believe after all? What sort of manner of man am I after all? What sort of show should I make after all, if the people round me knew my heart and all my secret thoughts? What sort of show, then, do I already make in the sight of Almighty God, who sees every man exactly as he is?”" - Charles Kingsley
"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way." - William James
"To spend life for something which outlasts it." - William James
"Let a clergyman but intend to please God in all his actions, as the happiest and best thing in the world, and then he will know that there is nothing noble in a clergyman but a burning zeal for the salvation of souls; nor anything poorer in his profession [than] idleness and a worldly spirit." - William Law
"Now this is the ground and original of the Spirit of Love in the creature, it is and must be a will to all goodness; and you have not the Spirit of Love in you till you have this will to all goodness at all times and on all occasions. You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them -- especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it." - William Law
"I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature." - William Matthews
"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ I reject that entirely, said Dirk sharply. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbably lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is that it is hopelessly improbable?...The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and...there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality." - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"Wits, like drunken men with swords, are apt to draw their steel upon their best acquaintances." - Douglas William Jerrold