This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
If I were asked what single qualification was necessary for one who has the care of children, I should say patience - patience with their tempers, with their understandings, with their progress. It is not brilliant parts or great acquirements which are necessary for teachers, but patience to go over first principles again and again; steadily to add a little every day; never to be irritated by willful or accidental hindrance.
Care | Children | Day | Little | Patience | Principles | Progress | Wisdom |
Albert Flanders, Albert I, born Albert Leopold Clément Marie Meinrad
Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.
Change | Duty | Opportunity | Wisdom |
Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
I hold the relay race theory of history: progress in human affairs depends upon accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time.
Duty | History | Individual | Progress | Race | Time | Wisdom |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.
It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.
Duty | Government | People | Right | Wisdom | Wrong | Government |
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal, every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open, this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude… The love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.
The end of worship amongst men is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him proceeds from our duty and is directed according to our capacity by those rules of honor that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them.
Capacity | Duty | Ends | Fear | God | Good | Honor | Hope | Man | Men | Power | Reason | Thankfulness | Wisdom | Worship | God |
In the whole range of human vision nothing is more attractive than to see a young man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor.
Duty | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Promise | Soul | Truth | Vision | Wisdom | World |
Emil G. Hirsch, fully Emil Gustav Hirsch
Wherever the right of property clashes with a duty toward humanity, the former has not credentials that are entitled to consideration.
Consideration | Duty | Humanity | Property | Right | Wisdom |
Let us have faith that right makes right, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Duty | Faith | Right | Wisdom | Understand |