This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When a thief is breaking into a house, he calls on God to help him.
The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.
Save a part of your income and begin now, for the man with a surplus controls circumstances and the man without a surplus is controlled by circumstances.
Circumstances | Man | Surplus | Wisdom |
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
Circumstances | Influence | Wisdom |
To keep from gravitating toward genocidal conflict, we must stop demanding perpetual progress. For quiet nonpolitical reasons, governments and politicians cannot achieve the paradise they habitually promise. Political leaders who continue to dangle before their constituents enticing carrots that are becoming unattainable hasten the erosion of faith in political processes. Circumstances have ceased to be what they were when the once-New World’s myth of limitlessness made sense.
Circumstances | Faith | Myth | Paradise | Progress | Promise | Quiet | Sense | Wisdom | World |
There is no use whatever trying to help people who do not help themselves. You cannot push anyone up a ladder unless he is willing to climb himself.
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.
Circumstances | Extreme | Mankind | Right | Wisdom | Think |
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.
Attention | Character | Charity | Conduct | Crime | Difficulty | Diplomacy | Events | Giving | Intrigue | Life | Life | Means | Men | Mystery | Order | Power | Providence | Purity | Selfishness | Service | Speech | Tact | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise |
Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from becoming a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, composed our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.
Age | Books | Conversation | Design | Entertainment | Men | Nothing | Pride | Solitude | Wisdom | Youth |
Auguste Comte, formally Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte
The happiness of every man depends on the harmony between the development of his various faculties and the entire system of circumstances which govern his life.
Circumstances | Harmony | Life | Life | Man | System | Wisdom | Govern | Happiness |
The dead carry our thoughts to another and a nobler existence. They teach us, and especially buy all the strange and seemingly untoward circumstances of their departure from this life, that they and we shall live in a future state forever.
Circumstances | Existence | Future | Life | Life | Teach | Wisdom |
The only rational way of educating is to be an example - if one can't help it, a warning example.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Awe | Curiosity | Day | Enough | Eternity | Important | Life | Life | Little | Mystery | Reality | Reason | Wisdom |