This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Forgiveness means giving up, letting go. It has nothing to do with condoning behavior. It's just letting the whole thing go. 'I forgive you for not being the way I want you to be. I forgive you and set you free.' (Affirmation sets you free.)
Behavior | Character | Forgiveness | Giving | Means | Nothing | Forgive |
What is called affluence - the consequence of the type of rapid economic development which occurred from about the middle of the nineteenth century - is in a real sense an abundance not just of serious problems which machines cannot solve, but of hopeless poverty: the physical insecurity, personal unhappiness, the intensified morality, the sense of being dwarfed by vast and uncontrollable physical, mechanical and corporate structures, the hatred and contempt of other peoples, the lack of opportunity for contemplation, the loss of community life.
Abundance | Character | Contemplation | Contempt | Insecurity | Life | Life | Machines | Morality | Opportunity | Poverty | Problems | Sense | Unhappiness | Loss |
Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known by pseudonymn Peter Parley
Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue and renders a man, in the pursuit or defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition in contempt.
Character | Consciousness | Contempt | Courage | Defense | Fear | Man | Opposition | Right | Virtue | Virtue |
Every man, no matter how great or small, must be viewed not as a means to an end, but as an end in himself.
Mary Eliza Haweis, aka Mrs. Hugh R. Haweis, maiden name Mary E. Joy
After all, what is vanity? If it means only a certain wish to look one’s best, is it not another name for self-respect? If it means inordinate self-admiration (very rare among persons with some occupation), it is less wicked than absurd.
Absurd | Admiration | Character | Means | Occupation | Respect | Self |
The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing... To you self-denial may only mean weariness, restraint, ennui; but it means, also, love, perfection, sanctification.
Character | Control | Education | Ennui | Good | Love | Man | Means | Nothing | Perfection | Restraint | Self | Self-denial | Success |
Suffering is a great teacher. Suffering teaches you the limitations of your power; it reminds you of the frailty of your health, the instability of your possessions, and the inadequacy of your means which have only been lent to you and must be returned as soon as the Owner desires it. Suffering visits you and teaches you the nothingness of your false greatness. It teaches you modesty.
Character | Greatness | Health | Instability | Means | Modesty | Possessions | Power | Suffering |
The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.
E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe
What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.
The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles, to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments. To hesitate or balance perplexes their understanding, checks their passion, and suspends their action.
Action | Argument | Balance | Character | Indulgence | Mankind | Passion | Principles | Understanding |
Men are disposed to live honestly, if the means of doing so are open to them.
Custom is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared I the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. We should never know how to adjust means to ends, or to employ our natural powers in the production of any effect. There would be an end at once of all action, as well as of the chief part of speculation.
Action | Character | Custom | Ends | Events | Experience | Future | Influence | Life | Life | Means | Memory | Past | Present | Speculation |
Nature... is frugal in her operations and will not be at the expense of a particular instinct to give us that knowledge which experience and habit will soon produce. Reproduced sights and contacts tied together with the present sensation in the unity of a thing with a name, these are complex objective stuff out of which my actually perceived table is made. Infants must go through a long education of the eye and ear before they can perceive the realities which adults perceive. Every perception is an acquired perception.
Character | Education | Experience | Habit | Instinct | Knowledge | Nature | Perception | Present | Unity | Will |
It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature. But it is pretended that some causes are necessary, some not necessary.
Cause | Chance | Character | Existence | Means | Nature | Nothing | Power |
There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors... Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways... Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Character | Education | Genius | Ideas | Little | Means | Mind | Struggle | Truth | Old |