This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Among well-bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt of others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority.
Attention | Authority | Contempt | Conversation | Deference | People | Superiority | Vehemence | Wisdom |
Money spent on ourselves may be a millstone about the neck; spent on others it may give us wings like eagles.
There is a price tag on human liberty. That price is the willingness to assume the responsibilities of being free men. Payment of this price is a personal matter with each of us. It is not something we can get others to pay for us. To let others carry the responsibilities of freedom and the work and worry that accompany them - while we share only in the benefits - may be a very human impulse, but it is likely to be fatal.
Freedom | Impulse | Liberty | Men | Price | Wisdom | Work | Worry |
Education: To be at home in all lands and ages; to count Nature as a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are the leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in general enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends.
Acquaintance | Age | Appreciation | Art | Criticism | Education | Ends | Friend | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Wisdom | Work | World | Appreciation | Art | Friends |
E. Stanley Jones, fully Eli Stanley Jones
A rattlesnake, if cornered, will become so angry it will bite itself. That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is - a biting of oneself.
Hate | Resentment | Will | Wisdom |
To find out what we presently are and where we are going, we must know what we have been and what others have done; and this, because the humanities are at once the creation and the interpreters of the past, is the great purpose of humanistic scholarship.
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.
He who has no opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others is a slave.
A wise man will select his books, for he would not wish to class them all under the sacred name of friends. Some can be accepted only as acquaintances. The best books of all kinds are taken to the heart, and cherished as his most precious possessions. Others to be chatted with for a time, to spend a few pleasant hours with and laid aside, but not forgotten.
Books | Heart | Man | Possessions | Sacred | Time | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
There is gold in the golden rule for the man who does not estimate others by the rule of gold.
Gold | Golden Rule | Man | Rule | Wisdom | Golden Rule |
This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
Compensation | Freedom | God | Wisdom | World |
The perfect condition of slavery... is nothing else but the state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive, for if once compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited power on the one side, and obedience on the other, the state of war and slavery ceases as long as the compact endures; for, as has been said, no man can by agreement pass over to another that which hath not in himself - a power over his own life.
Life | Life | Man | Nothing | Obedience | Power | Slavery | War | Wisdom |
Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
Wisdom |
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
We are never the same with others as when we are alone; we are different, even, when we are in the dark with them.
Wisdom |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.
The best way to come to truth being to examine things as really they are, and not to conclude they are as we fancy of ourselves, or have been taught by others to imagine.