This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.
You will cast away your cards and dice when you find the sweetness of youthful learning.
Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sided. We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears. Virtues are lost in interest, as rivers are swallowed up in the sea.
A guilty conscience is a hell on earth, and points to one beyond.
Character | Conscience | Earth | Hell | Guilty |
When a man does a noble act, date him from that. Forget his faults. Let his noble act be the standpoint from which you regard him.
Rabbi Akiva, fully Rebbe Akiva ben Yosef NULL
"Love thy neighbor" is the Torah's greatest principle.
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
True friendship... always involves the dominance of benevolent impulses, tending toward the benefit of the beloved, whereas the counterfeits of friendship spring primarily or purely from acquisitive desire - seeking something for one’s self.
Character | Desire | Self | Friendship |
There is no unmixed good in human affairs; the best principles, if pushed to excess, degenerate into fatal vices. Generosity is nearly allied to extravagance; charity itself may lead to ruin; the sternness of justice is but one step removed from the severity of oppression. It is the same in the political world; the tranquillity of despotism resembles the stagnation of the Dead Sea; the fever of innovation the tempests of the ocean It would seem as if, at particular periods, from causes inscrutable to human wisdom, a universal frenzy seizes mankind; reason, experience, prudence, are alike blinded; and the very classes who are to perish in the storm are the first to raise its fury.
Character | Charity | Excess | Experience | Extravagance | Fury | Generosity | Good | Innovation | Justice | Mankind | Oppression | Principles | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Tranquility | Wisdom | World |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
Do not consider anything for your interest which makes you break your word, quit your modesty, or inclines you to any practice which will not bear the light, or look the world in the face.
The most generous and merciful in judgment upon the faults of others, are always the most free from faults themselves.
Sorrow comes soon enough without despondency. It does a man no good to carry around a lightning-rod to attract trouble.
Lee Atwater, fully Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.
Brotherhood | Character | Heart | Little | Society | Society |
Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart, like a viper in its hole.
Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape.
Character | Conscience |
Jonah Barrington, Sir Jonah Barrington
Dress has a moral effect upon the conduct of mankind.
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.
Character | Melancholy | Poverty | Work |
There is no shame in having fallen. Nor any shame in being born into a lowly estate. There is only shame in not struggling to rise. And also shame for not wishing to attain the better. Or not dreaming about it and praying for it.
Conquer your heart; then you may become somebody.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
To have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?