This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When your fear touches someone’s pain it becomes pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion.
The greatest contribution of human value one person can make to others is by example.
There is not a vice which more effectually contracts and deadens the feelings, which more completely makes a man’s affections center in himself, and excludes all others from partaking in them, than the desire of accumulating possessions. When the desire has once gotten hold of the heart, it shuts out all other considerations, but such as may promote its views. In its zeal for the attainment of its end, it is not delicate in the choice of means. As it closes the heart, so also it clouds the understanding. It cannot discern between right and wrong; it takes evil for good, and good for evil; it calls darkness light, and light darkness. Beware, then, of the beginning of covetousness, for you know not where it will end.
Attainment | Beginning | Character | Choice | Darkness | Desire | Evil | Feelings | Good | Heart | Light | Man | Means | Possessions | Right | Understanding | Will | Wrong | Zeal | Vice |
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Character | Love | Perfection | Truth | World |
Lynn Margulis and Carl Lindegren
New ideas have a hard time in science. They tend to be suppressed by arrogance - condemnation by acknowledged leaders in the field... Dogmatism restrains, iconoclasm liberates. Vanity, powermongering, avariciousness, pride, dedication, love, industry, sadism and most other attributes of people apply to science and to scientists as well.
Arrogance | Character | Dedication | Ideas | Industry | Love | People | Pride | Science | Time |
Intelligence is kindness. Kindness is intelligence. The fundamental, which the two terms suggest in different ways... is the same quality on which all human civilization is built.
Character | Civilization | Intelligence | Kindness |
Age, when it does not harden the heart and sour the temper, naturally returns to the milky disposition of infancy. Time as the same effect upon the mind as on the face. The predominant passion, the strongest feature, becomes more conspicuous from the others retiring.
Age | Character | Heart | Infancy | Mind | Passion | Temper | Time |
The most infectiously joyous men and women are those who forget themselves in thinking about others and serving others. Happiness comes not by deliberately courting and wooing it but by giving oneself in self-effacing surrender to great values.
Character | Giving | Men | Self | Surrender | Thinking | Happiness |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
We do not aim to correct the man we hang; we correct and warn others by him.
If we crave for the goal that is worthy and fitting for man, namely, happiness of life - and this is accomplished by philosophy alone and by nothing else, and philosophy, as I said, means for us desire for wisdom, and wisdom the science of truth in things, and of things some are properly so called, others merely share the name - it is reasonable and most necessary to distinguish and systematize the accidental qualities of things.
Character | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nothing | Philosophy | Qualities | Science | Truth | Wisdom | Happiness |
We are not immortal, but our acts are... The question is not why we exist but whether we deserve to exist as supposedly rational beings if we act like conquerors rather than caring beings willing to share the planet with all those who are less powerful, and to act with restraint in respecting the needs of others and all life to come. As a species, we are on trial to see whether rationality was an advance or a tragic mistake.
Character | Life | Life | Mistake | Question | Rationality | Restraint | Trial |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
I quote others [in order to better express my own self] only the better to express myself.
W. H. Murray, fully William Hutchinson Murray
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Boldness | Chance | Character | Decision | Events | Genius | Ideas | Ignorance | Initiative | Magic | Man | Power | Providence | Respect | Truth | Respect |