This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
If choosing freely for oneself is the highest value, the free choice to wear red socks is as valuable as the free choice to murder one’s father or sacrifice oneself for one’s friend. Such a belief is ridiculous.
Belief | Character | Choice | Father | Free choice | Friend | Murder | Sacrifice | Murder |
When performing a good deed and other people are present, imagine you are standing in a forest surrounded only by trees and flowers. In the long run there is no difference between the two situations. Just as the trees have no awareness of what you are doing, so too in the long run it does not make a difference what those people thought about you for the few seconds they saw you.
Awareness | Character | Good | People | Present | Thought | Awareness | Thought |
The physical loss is not sufficient for mourning. Purely on a physical level what would a person gain if he lived many more years? What is the ultimate gain in devouring hundreds more chickens and thousands more loaves of bread? What is the overall difference if the deceased left all this to others? The Torah obligates us to mourn to emphasize the loss of the true value of life; which is the spiritual elevation a person could have gained if he were still alive. The Almighty placed him on this earth for this purpose. The person’s death should remind the mourners to fill their lives with the spiritual growth that they are capable of.
Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Life | Life | Mourn | Mourning | Purpose | Purpose | Loss | Torah | Value |
Mary Warnock, fully Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
Without some element of objectivity, without any criterion for preferring one scheme of values to another, except the criterion of what looks most attractive to oneself, there cannot in fact be any morality at all.
Character | Looks | Morality | Objectivity |
As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, "What is truth?"
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Religious addiction is using God, the Church, or a belief system as an escape from reality, in an attempt to find or elevate a sense of self-worth or well-being... It is the ultimate form of co-dependency - feeling worthless in and of ourselves and looking outside for something or someone to tell us we are worthwhile... Recovery means discovering divinity in one's own life.
Addiction | Belief | Church | Divinity | God | Life | Life | Means | Reality | Self | Self-worth | Sense | System | Wisdom | Worth |
It is the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.
Common Sense | Genius | Nature | Sense | Wisdom |
Whatever difference there may appear to be in man's fortunes, there is still a certain compensation of good and ill in all, that makes them equal.
Compensation | Good | Man | Wisdom |
Thomas Buxton, fully Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet
The longer I live, the more I am certain that the difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, between the great and the insignificant, is energy - invincible determination - a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory.
Death | Determination | Energy | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Wisdom |
False beliefs tend to undermine the identification of the subject matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of a description of the belief as being about that subject... The more things a believer is right about, the sharper his errors are. To much mistake simply blurs the focus.
Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.
Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
When we abandon the thought of immortality we at least have cast out fear. We gain a certain dignity and self-respect. We regard our fellow travelers as companions in the pleasures and tribulations of life... We gain kinship with the world.
Dignity | Fear | Immortality | Life | Life | Regard | Respect | Self | Thought | Tribulations | Wisdom | World | Thought |