This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
You know what makes leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do and like it.
In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms" - the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances."
Ability | Circumstances | Goals | Life | Life | Circumstance |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
Ability | Contemplation | Dawn | Day | Expectation | Life | Life | Man | Contemplation | Expectation | Learn |
The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain justice, to end the massive violence of war.
Ability | Better | Existence | Idealism | Justice | Men | Power | Unique | War |
The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
The true measure of spirituality lies not in having visions of angels, but in the ability to make that unpleasant phone call.
Ability | Angels | Spirituality |
No matter how brilliant our attempts to inform, it is our ability to inspire that will turn the tides.
You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.
The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.
Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone.
Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the works of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
Consider the postage stamp my son: Its usefulness consists in its ability to stick to one thing until it gets there
Ability | Usefulness |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Transcendence is a movement into the unknown, the ability to rise and go beyond limitation and restraint… it is our biological birthright, built into us genetically and blocked by our enculturation.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Judgment is not upon all occasions required, but discretion always is.
Discretion | Judgment |