This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Art is the proper task of life, art is life's metaphysical exercise... Art is worth more than truth.
Pain by itself is merely pain, but the experience of pain couples with an understanding that the pain serves a worthy purpose as suffering. Suffering can be endured because there is a reason for it that is worth the effort. What is more worthy of your pain than the evolution of your soul?
Evolution | Experience | Pain | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Suffering | Understanding | Worth |
Men who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered when others gave up in despair, have practiced early in life the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose. As a result, they enjoy in later life the success so often erroneously attributed to good luck.
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
Cause | Enough | Evil | Good | Men | Progress | Scepticism | World | Worth |
There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation - veneer isn't worth anything.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
Creed | Happy | Optimism | People | Philosophy | Pleasure | Reason | Worth | Happiness |
Keep a definite goal of achievement constantly in view. Realize that work well and worthily done makes life truly worth living.
Achievement | Life | Life | Work | Worth |
It is not what he had, or even what he does which expresses the worth of man, but what he is.
Worth |
The difficulty is not that great to die for a friend, the hard part is finding a friend worth dying for.
Difficulty | Friend | Worth |
But there is only one avenue of access to that higher life. It is through a radical purging of inner unreality and the full and final surrender of one's whole self, all that one is and all that one possesses, to the imperious command of the Living God. From that surrender, when complete and unreserved, will follow release from defeat or ennui and the gift of utterly new joy and strength. The old life will be cast away; the old harrowing problems will dissolve; one will stand free from the shackles of temptation, self-consciousness, selfishness; for the first time in one's life, one will know the meaning of spiritual freedom. All that one has heard with the hearing of the ears about the life of religion, all that one has dismissed as the familiar exaggeration of religious propagandists or naïve faith no longer possible for intelligent moderns — all this will come vividly alive within one's own soul. One now knows, with a certainty for which there is no parallel, the truth of religion's claims — the absolutely unique character of the dedicated life, the vivid and continuous awareness of God's presence, the priceless worth of complete fellowship with Him, the service which is perfect freedom.
Awareness | Character | Defeat | Ennui | Exaggeration | Faith | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Problems | Service | Surrender | Time | Truth | Unique | Will | Worth | Awareness | Old |
Say to whatever seems worth having: 'If you do not want me as much as I want you, I do not want you at all. I can do without you and sorrow not; but I will welcome you if you come. Take your choice. It does not matter to me.
Everything new endangers something old. A new machine replaces human hands; a new source of power threatens old businesses; a new trade route wipes out the supremacy of old ports and brings prosperity to new ones. This is the price that must be paid for progress and it is worth it.
To me, then, true criticism consists in trying to find out the intrinsic worth of the thing itself, and not in attributing a quality to that thing. You attribute a quality to an environment, to an experience, only when you want to derive something from it, when you want to gain or to have power or happiness. Now this destroys true criticism. Your desire is perverted through attributing values, and therefore you cannot see clearly. Instead of trying to see the flower in its original and entire beauty, you look at it through coloured glasses, and therefore you can never see it as it is.
J. C. Hare (1795-1855) and A. W. Hare
Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him; and, on the other hand, it would portray a sorry want of faith to distrust a friend because he laughs at you. Few men, I believe, are much worth loving in whom there is not something well worth laughing at.
Money does motivate but only for a short time and only as long as it serves as a measure of worth or of power or of victory.
To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance.