This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"We have lost touch with our humanity. We have lost touch with our purpose. We have lost sight of the things that matter the most… How many lives will you touch… what legacy will you leave behind… How can I find greater meaning in my life?... My answer always begins the same way: Find your calling. I believe we all have special talents that are just waiting to be engaged in a worthy pursuit. We are all here for some unique purpose, some noble objective that will allow us to manifest our highest human potential, while we, at the same time, add value to the lives around us." - Robin Sharma
"Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism." - Rollo May, fully Rollo Reese May
"The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering, no consciousness of karmic bondage, there will be no power of attaining spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field of non-distinction. Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering." - Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
"The best rules to form a young man, are; to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"The best rules to form a young man are to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated; it is the highest achievement of man." - Thomas Carlyle
"We can end the impossible quest for the perfect structure - the happy family, the completely satisfying marriage, the unbroken friendship. We can find some purpose in the failures, the intimacies that never got off the ground, the possibilities that never took flesh. The soul does not share the spirit’s love of perfection and wholeness, but finds value in fragmentation, incompleteness, and unfulfilled promise." - Thomas Moore
"Titles are of no value to posterity; the name of a man who has achieved great deeds imposes more respect than any or all epithets." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha
"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival. But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present has begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead 'a nation rich in natural resources'; the good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison, and other forms of 'waste.' "The inevitable result of such an economy is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. 'Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans--the unborn, the old, 'disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the 'unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash-heap or the dump." - Wendell Berry
"As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect." - William Hazlitt
"To think justly we must understand what others mean: to know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds." - William Hazlitt
"Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham
"What is reality? The simple picture before your eyes. Your emotional reaction, however, is based entirely on the way you personally perceived the situation... Facts themselves are neutral. You do not have emotional reactions to facts. Your emotional reaction is always based on your subjective evaluation of any situation... Learn to differentiate between facts, inferences, and value judgments. Facts do not make you happy or sad. It is only your value judgments that do." - Zelig Pliskin
"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive... But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves." - Eda J. LeShan
"Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact. " - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
"You may ask — you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simply enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity: gnothi seauton... get to know yourself!" - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit. " - Fran Lebowitz, fully Frances Ann "Fran" Lebowitz
"I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. " - Francis Ford Coppola
"I know that theater people often have very simplistic view of politics and tend to express very black and white patriotic sentiments but perhaps that is because we know the value of illusion, how it can help strengthen the weak, and stimulate the weary" - Franco Zeffirelli
"By morality the individual is taught to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe to himself value only as a function... Morality is the herd instinct in the individual." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The value of a man can only be measured with regard to other men. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value of life is ultimately decisive." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature - nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present - and it was we who gave and bestowed it. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. " - F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
"Lack of self-worth is the fundamental source of all emotional pain. A feeling of insecurity, unworthiness and lack of value is the core experience of powerlessness." - Gary Zukav
"It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts." - George Washington
"We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. " - Georges Duhamel, Pen name Denis Thevenin
"Put your principles into practice. What you do, not what you say, is the essential thing. Dormant aspirations are of value only as they are translated into acts. Transform your desires into deeds, your resolutions into results." - Grenville Kleiser
"The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power." - Harry Allen Overstreet
"A modern teacher educates children to value their emotions." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
"For the value of everything exists for man only so long as he does not understand it. When he has fully understood, the value is lost, be it the lowest thing or the highest thing." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
"There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself. " - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The search for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value until most has been swept away. " - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"It is the service we are not obliged to give that people value most. " - J. C. Penney, formally James Cash Penney
"Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value - the ultimate value of what one does." - James Hilton
"Friends are found on the battlefield, and unfortunately friends are also lost. And where do we find the measure of that sacrifice? How can we account for the value of that loss? Sometimes we can find an answer in our sense of country, at other times in our Corps. But clearly we can see it in the lives that were able to continue due to the acts of others who were not so fortunate." - Jim Webb, formally James Henry Webb, Jr.
"Age acquires no value save through thought and discipline. " - James Truslow Adams
"The great value of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it" - James Truslow Adams
"He who knows enough of things to value them at their true worth never says too much; for he can also judge of the attention bestowed on him and the interest aroused by what he says. People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace." -
"Men ascribe a great value in the sight of God to their barren belief. Why are we so anxious that our neighbor should have our faith and not our practice?" - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter