This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand.
Distinction | Men | Opportunity | Talent |
Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other; it warns us with a voice tht even the sagest discredit too long, and the silliest believe too late. Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it; he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.
Ambition | Desire | Dread | Enemy | Fear | Friend | Grave | Hope | Little | Opportunity | Repentance | Time | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
There is opportunity in every adversity, but it is only apparent when you look for it.
Adversity | Opportunity |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
The man who grasps an opportunity as it is paraded before him, nine times out of ten make a success; but the man who makes his own opportunities is, barring an accident, a sure-fire success!
Accident | Man | Opportunity | Success |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
The trouble with most of us is that we keep our eyes closed to opportunities that thrust themselves at us; and rare is the man who searches for his opportunity or sees one even when he stumbles over it.
Man | Opportunity | Trouble |
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
Freedom | Means | Opportunity | Will |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living which give man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
Enough | Liberty | Man | Opportunity |
Frédéric Bastiat, fully Claude Frédéric Bastiat
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Both houses of Congress have, by their joint Committee, requested me “To recommend to the People of the United States, a Day of Public Thanksgiving and Prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful Hearts the many Signal Favours of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a Form of Government for their Safety and Happiness”... That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind Care and Protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation; for the signal and manifold Mercies, and the favourable Interpositions of his Providence in the Course & Conclusion of the late War; for the great Degree of Tranquillity, Union, and Plenty, which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational Manner in which we have been enabled to establish Constitutions of Government for our Safety and Happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious Liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general, for all the great and various Favours which he hath been pleased to confer upon us... to enable us all, whether in public or private Stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually... to promote the Knowledge and Practice of true Religion and Virtue, and the increase of Science among them and us; and generally to grant unto all mankind such a Degree of temporal Prosperity as He alone knows to be best.
Care | Day | God | Government | Knowledge | Liberty | Mankind | Means | Opportunity | People | Plenty | Practice | Prayer | Prosperity | Providence | Public | Religion | Science | Tranquility | Virtue | Virtue | War | Government |
Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their centre.
Change | Experience | Imagination | Opportunity | Will |
Age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Age | Day | Opportunity | Youth | Youth |
Hippocrates, fully known as Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos NULL
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
Art | Experience | Judgment | Life | Life | Opportunity | Art |
For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Age | Day | Opportunity | Youth | Youth |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
What is leisure but opportunity for more complete and entire action?
Action | Leisure | Opportunity |
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.
Challenge | Good | Opportunity | Present | Public | System | Learn |
In the heat of [social] movements brains are set stirring with new ideas which live on through quieter times, waiting for another opportunity to ignite into action and change the world around us.
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are mor than enough for others.
Enough | Opportunity | People | Time |
Every temptation is an opportunity of our getting nearer to God.
God | Opportunity | Temptation | Temptation |