This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
No man ever knows the few joys of living without some sort of success to his credit. Of all the games worth a candle, success is first. The greatest punishment is to be despised by your neighbors, the world and members of your family.
Character | Credit | Family | Man | Punishment | Success | World | Worth |
Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.
Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
For most utopians, the incremental approach is far too slow and unglamorous. It lacks cataclysmic drama. They want to save the world today and send out a great press release tomorrow morning. Feeding a hungry child tonight doesn’t draw a crowd.
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
It is the responsibility of the conscious, rational mind to decide what it accepts, retains, and dwells upon. It’s an immense responsibility.
Character | Mind | Responsibility |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.
Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Each is driven by the most relentless, persistent instinct man possesses: the instinct for meaning, transcendence, wholeness and truth... Reality is a continuum that extends from thinking to the denser world of physical form.
Character | Instinct | Man | Meaning | Reality | Thinking | Truth | Wholeness | World |
The inlet of a man's mind is what he learns; the outlet is what he accomplishes. If his mind is not fed by a continued supply of new ideas which he puts to work with purpose, and if there is no outlet in action, his mind becomes stagnant. Such a mind is a danger to the individual who owns it and is useless to the community.
Action | Character | Danger | Ideas | Individual | Man | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Work | Danger |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
So long as we are on a search for pain-free human relationships, or shifting responsibility for all our hurt and all our fears of abandonment, or seeking ourselves in others, we have not yet found the thread that will lead us toward God, or ourselves. When we learn to accept ourselves - not just our public achievements and private successes, not just the divine being we are evolving into, but also our failures, inadequacies, cowardices and fears - then we will be able to embrace the strangers among us, because we will, finally, have embraced the stranger inside ourselves.
Character | God | Pain | Public | Responsibility | Search | Will | Learn |
Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there’s a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great.
It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
Character | Experience | Mind |
The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on.
Attention | Character | Consciousness | Mind | Rest | Suppression |
Nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object... The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connection with objects. The supposition of such a connection is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.
Character | Experience | Mind | Nothing | Object | Perception | Present |
There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |