This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Anyone can become part of the critical mass that offers us a chance of improving the world before it is too late. You can rethink your goals and question what you are doing with your life. If your present way of living does not stand up against an impartial standard of value, then you can change it.
Chance | Change | Goals | Life | Life | Present | Question | World |
It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They known from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more then they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it.
Confidence | Despise | Experience | Good | Means | Men | Observation | People | Public | Reason | Right | Sense | Wonder |
You should remember that though another may have more money, beauty, and brains than you, when it comes to the rarer spiritual values such as charity, self-sacrifice, honor and nobility of heart, you have an equal chance with everyone to be the most beloved and honored of all people.
Beauty | Chance | Charity | Heart | Honor | Money | Nobility | People | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice |
Every result of chance is from what is spontaneous, but not everything that is from what is spontaneous is from chance.
Chance |
The man who has been born into a position of wealth comes to look upon it as something without which he could no more live than he could live without air; he guards it as he does his very life; and so he is generally a lover of order, prudent and economical. But the man who has been born into a poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety the less.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Chance | Fortune | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Order | Position | Wealth |
According to the true nature of things, everyone has all the sufferings of the world as his own; indeed, he has to look upon all merely possible sufferings as actual for him, so long as he is the firm and constant will-to-live, in other words, affirms life with all his strength. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, given by chance or won from it by shrewdness, amid the sufferings of innumerable others, is only a beggar’s dream, in which he is a king, but from which he must awake, in order to realize that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life.
Chance | Happy | Illusion | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nature | Order | Strength | Suffering | Time | Will | Words | World |
One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their faculty of determining the relative importance of different things. There are many things which it is more desirable to do, a few are essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few essential things are... Let one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being done or left undone.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.
Chance |
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything really badly that reason says you have little or no chance of getting.
Chance | Contentment | Little | Reason |