This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
One should never place confidence in the future--it doesn't deserve it.
Confidence | Future |
T. Berry Brazelton, fully Thomas Berry Brazelton
Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles, with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them – all of these further a child’s brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months. Research demonstrates that the early responsiveness of caring parents sets the tone for future self-esteem, trust, problem solving, ability to communicate successfully and motivation for future learning.
Ability | Children | Esteem | Future | Learning | Parents | Reading | Research | Self | Self-esteem | Smile | Trust |
If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.
Confidence | Life | Life | Race | Self |
The school system can’t make up for family failure. The total education of our children is a cooperative effort requiring community solidarity. Apathetic parents who foster a permissive home atmosphere create a problem for everyone.
Children | Education | Effort | Failure | Family | Parents | System |
The act of praying centers attention on the higher emotion, unifies the spirit, crystallizes emotions, clarifies the judgments, releases latent powers, reinforces confidence that what needs to be done can be done.
Attention | Confidence | Emotions | Spirit |
Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we’d had.
Children | Opportunity | Parents |
Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
Abstract | Awareness | Capacity | Desire | Faith | Force | Ideas | Intuition | Knowledge | Lying | Man | Mind | Nature | Order | Reality | Reason | Self | Will | Wonder | Awareness |
While your parents and teachers are, for the most part, well-meaning people, they are nevertheless more interested in your finding ways to please them than in your finding ways to please yourself. And so, in the process of socialization, almost all people in almost all societies lose their way because they are coaxed or coerced away from their own Guidance System.
Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the pubic interests… Call them… Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object.
Confidence | Distrust | Fear | Men | Object | People | Safe | Wise |
Isidore of Seville, fully Saint Isidore of Seville NULL
Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.
Chance | Confidence | Despair | Hope | Mercy | Pardon | Sin |
The toddler must say "no" in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says "no" to assert who she is not.
Avarice | Compassion | Nothing | Parents | People | Pride | Tenderness | Youth | Youth |
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going one knows that he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse.
Confidence | Ignorance | Loneliness | Man | People | Remorse | Trust |
Learning to live deliberately and with confidence as well as knowing how to love one’s self and to be consistently happy – although not always easy – are fundamental to happiness and fulfillment.
Confidence | Fulfillment | Happy | Knowing | Learning | Love | Self | Happiness |
What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?
Confidence | God | Little | Prayer | God |
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.
Confidence | Courage | Experience | Fear | Strength | Think |
Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
You gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face. You must do that which we think we cannot.
Confidence | Courage | Experience | Fear | Strength | Think |