This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Difficulty | Merit | Money | People | Will |
Opportunities ... fall in the way of every man who is resolved to take advantage of them.
Difficulty | Growth | Man | Worth |
The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.
Difficulty | Men |
Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neorosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I suppose that I am commuting a felony. But it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life.
Difficulty | Present |
Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.
Difficulty | Knowledge | Little | Mistake | Nothing | Time | Will | Think |
Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Wherever I go I will find you, my God
Difficulty | God | Guidance | Guidance | God |
Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL
How many persons fancy they have experience simply because they have grown old!
Courage | Difficulty |
What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? ...Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! ...But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.
Day | Difficulty | Famous | Labor | Right | Struggle | Value |
It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all.
Contradiction | Difficulty | God | Men | Reason | Right | Satan | Will | World | God |
As when a man comes into a palace, built according to the exactest rule of art, and with an unexceptionable conveniency for the inhabitants, he would acknowledge both the being and skill of the builder; so whosoever shall observe the disposition of all the parts of the world, their connection, comeliness, the variety of seasons, the swarms of different creatures, and the mutual offices they render to one another, cannot conclude less, than it was contrived by an infinite skill, effected by infinite power, and governed by infinite wisdom. None can imagine a ship to be orderly conducted without a pilot; nor the parts of the world to perform their several functions without a wise guide; considering the members of the body cannot perform theirs, without the active presence of the soul. The atheist, then, is a fool to deny that which every creature in his constitution asserts, and thereby renders himself unable to give a satisfactory account of that constant uniformity in the motions of the creatures.
The dead are living all around us, watching with eager anticipation how we will handle the opportunities they left in our hands when they died.
Difficulty | Faith | Need |
Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
Religion is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
Consequences | Difficulty | Thinking |
Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being.
Authority | Difficulty | Existence | Force | Knowledge | Men | Peace | Power | Size | Work |
The object of government is the welfare of the people. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.
Difficulty | Enough | Individual | Necessity | Need | Organization |
We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.
Difficulty | Labor | Man | Means | Nature | Will | Youth | Youth |