This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Knowledge does not comprise all which is contained in the large term of education. The feelings are to be disciplined; the passions are to be restrained; true and worthy motives are to be inspired; a profound religious feeling is to be instilled, and pure morality inculcated under all circumstances. All this is comprised in education.
Character | Circumstances | Education | Feelings | Knowledge | Morality | Motives |
Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
Envy deserves pity more than anger for it hurts nobody so much as itself. It is a distemper rather than a vice: for nobody would feel envy if he could help it. Whoever envies another, secretly allows that person's superiority.
Anger | Character | Envy | Pity | Superiority |
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.
Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |
William Blackstone, fully Sir William Blackstone
The suicide is guilt of a double offence; one spiritual, in invading the prerogative of the Almighty... the other temporal, against the king.
Happiness is a resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.
There is the laughter which is born out of the pure joy of living, the spontaneous expression of health and energy - the secret laughter of the child. This is a gift of God. There is the warm laughter of the kindly soul which heartens the discouraged, gives health to the sick and comfort to the dying... There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter that triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence.
Beauty | Comfort | Energy | Eternal | Excellence | God | Health | Joy | Laughter | Light | Pain | Passion | Riches | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | World | Riches | Hardship | Beauty |
To bring one's self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.