This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, born Ferdinand Lewis "Lew" Alcinder, Jr.
The reason we’re here is to exercise personal responsibility, to evolve the higher self and to influence that development in others.
Character | Influence | Reason | Responsibility | Self |
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
Illusion and self-deception stand in the way of an honest, penetrating and fearless self-appraisal. Though it would appear that we have access to the innermost core of our individual being, and that there is nothing in the world with which we are on more intimate terms than our own self, the self remains an elusive object of knowledge and understanding.
Character | Illusion | Individual | Knowledge | Nothing | Object | Self | Self-deception | Understanding | World |
When people say to me: "How do you do so many things?" I often answer them, without meaning to be cruel: "How to you do so little?" It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever."
Character | Confidence | Little | Meaning | People |
Affliction is a school of virtue: it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.
Affliction | Character | Confidence | Virtue | Virtue |
S'rîmad Bhâgavatam, aka Bhâgavata Purâna or Bhāgavata
Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.
More than all, and above all Washington was master of himself. If there be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total disregard of self when in the most elevated positions for influence and example.
Character | Control | Example | Influence | Men | Present | Self |
He who beholds in all beings in the self and the self in all beings, he never turns away from it. When to a man who understands, the self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who once beheld that unity?
Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke
When a person who was self conscious only, enters into cosmic consciousness - he knows without learning certain things... that the universe is not a dead machine but a living presence... that in its essence and tendency it is infinitely good... that individual existence is continuous beyond what is called death.
Character | Consciousness | Death | Existence | Good | Individual | Learning | Self | Universe |
Industry is not only the instrument of improvement, but the foundation of pleasure. He who is a stranger to it may possess, but cannot enjoy; for it is labor only which gives relish to pleasure. It is the appointed vehicle of every good to man. It is the indispensable condition of possessing a sound mind in a sound body.
Body | Character | Good | Improvement | Indispensable | Industry | Labor | Man | Mind | Pleasure | Sound |
Pierre Claude Boiste, fully Pierre Claude Victor Boiste
He who has lost confidence can lose nothing more.
Character | Confidence | Nothing |
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
Age | Change | Character | Error | Labor | Life | Life | Youth |