This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
For man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.
Character | Isolation | Life | Life | Man | Misfortune | Poverty |
We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient realization of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paving our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly, - the more athletic trim, in short, the fighting shape.
Character | Fighting | Indifference | Life | Life | Poverty | Power | Right | Soul |
If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth , for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.
Better | Character | Good | Knowledge | Love | Time | Wealth | Will | Friends |
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.
Who can confess his poverty and look it in the face, destroys its sting: but a proud poor man, he is poor, indeed.
Contentment furnishes constant joy; much covetousness, constant grief. To the contented, even poverty is joy; to the discontented, even wealth is a vexation.
The want of goods is easily repaired, but the poverty of the soul is irreparable.
We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than our own. Man can in nothing fix and conform himself to his mere necessity. Of pleasure, wealth and power he grasps at more than he can hold; his greediness is incapable of moderation.
Character | Man | Moderation | Necessity | Nothing | Pleasure | Power | Wealth | Think |