This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah NULL
Who stimulates others to do good is greater than the doer.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us - the ties that have made others depend on us - and would cut them in two.
Life in this world is a very important reality, but it is not the ultimate reality... True growth in this world always calls for a dying to my own sinfulness, individualism and selfishness so that I might come closer to my true self in relationship to all others and to God. Thus, in the end, life and death are not diametrically opposed. Life involves a dying and dying is a way of life.
Character | Death | God | Growth | Important | Life | Life | Reality | Relationship | Self | Selfishness | World |
Everyone suffers. But many do not take it to heart that the suffering comes as a punishment for transgressions, rather they consider it accidental. The proper attitude is that suffering is an atonement. With this realization a person appreciates that suffering in this world saves him suffering in the next.
Character | Heart | Punishment | Suffering | World |
He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety, as accepted by other people.
Character | Conduct | Glory | Law | People | Piety | Reality | Reverence | Wit |
Of all the animals on earth, man has shown himself to be the most cruel and brutal. He is the only animal that will create instruments of death for his own destruction. Man is the only animal on all the earth that has ever been known to burn its young as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of some imaginary deity. He is the only one that will build homes, towns, and cities at such a cost in sacrifice and suffering and turn around and destroy them in war.
Character | Cost | Death | Destroy | Earth | Man | Sacrifice | Suffering | War | Will |
Righteousness, or justice, is, undoubtedly of all the virtues, the surest foundation on which to create and establish a new state. But there are two nobler virtues, industry and frugality, which tend more to increase the wealth, power and grandeur of the community, than all the others without them.
Character | Frugality | Industry | Justice | Power | Righteousness | Wealth |
Only the man who can impose discipline on himself is fit to discipline others or can impose discipline on others.
Character | Discipline | Man |
Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.
Getting alone with others is the essence of getting ahead, success being linked with cooperation.
Character | Cooperation | Success |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, born Margaret Power
One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as person scan easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.
Character | Consciousness | People |
Contempt of others is the truest symptom of a base and bad heart, while it suggests itself to the mean and the vile, and tickles their little fancy on every occasion, it never enters the great and good mind but on the strongest motives; nor is it then a welcome guest - affording only an uneasy sensation, and bringing always with it a mixture of concern and compassion.
Character | Compassion | Contempt | Good | Heart | Little | Mind | Motives |