This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In an age remarkable for good reasoning and bad conduct, for sound rules and corrupt manners, when virtue fills our heads, but vice our hearts; when those who would fain persuade us that they are quite sure of heaven, appear in no greater hurry to go there than other folks, but put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst; in an age when modesty herself is more ashamed of detection than delinquency; when independence of principle consists in having no principle on which to depend; and free thinking, not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking; in an age when patriots will hold anything except their tongues; keep anything except their word; and lose nothing patiently except their character; to improve such an age must be difficult; to instruct it dangerous; and he stands no chance of amending it who cannot at the same time amuse it.
Age | Chance | Character | Conduct | Detection | Good | Heaven | Hurry | Manners | Modesty | Nothing | Sound | Thinking | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |
There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity.
Chance | Cruelty | God | Humanity | Justice | Mercy | Merit | Motives | Service | Will | Cruelty | Value | Victim |
Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it...Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike - brothers of one father and one mother, with only the sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all.
Chance | Earth | Father | Government | Law | Man | Men | Mother | People | Rights | Spirit | Will | Government |
Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat
If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases.
Chance | Earth | Law | Liberty | Man | Men | Mother | Peace | People | Rights | Spirit | Wants |
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
Truth is strengthened by observation and time, pretenses by haste and uncertainty.
Haste | Observation | Time | Truth | Uncertainty |
He is a truly virtuous man who wishes always to be open to the observation of honest men.
Man | Men | Observation | Wishes |
He is not a reasonable man who by chance stumbles upon reason, but he who derives it from knowledge, from discernment, and from taste.
It is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observation of time and place and of decency in general that what is called taste consists; and which is in reality no other that a more refined judgment. The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
Cause | Judgment | Manners | Observation | Reality | Skill | Taste | Time | Wrong |
Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.
Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
In periods of decadence only very independent geniuses have a chance to survive.
The whole record of civilization is a record of the failure of money as a higher incentive. The enormous majority of men never make any serious effort to get rich. The few who are sordid enough to do so easily become millionaires with a little luck, and astonish the others by the contrast between their riches and their stupidity... The belief in money as an incentive is founded on the observation that people will do for money what they will not do for anything else.
Belief | Civilization | Contrast | Effort | Enough | Failure | Little | Luck | Majority | Men | Money | Observation | People | Riches | Stupidity | Will | Riches | Failure |
[Zen] is not a kind of “self-actualization,” an expansion of the limited, isolated Me, of the empirical ego. Neither is it a regression, a return into that vegetative ooze of Oneness, before we became aware of our differentiation as separate egos. On the contrary, the Zen experience is the overcoming of the hallucination that the Me is the valid center of observation of the universe. It is a momentary, radical turnabout, a direct perception of and insight into the presence, into the transiency, the finitude that I share with all beings.
Ego | Experience | Insight | Observation | Oneness | Perception | Self | Universe | Zen |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning, an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Morality | Observation | Religion |
If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.