This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
The character of a people, like the character of a person, should not be measured by its worst, but rather by its best; and reckoned by that rule and by that standard.
Be as careful of the books you read as the company you keep. Your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
There are usually no benefits from becoming angry at others. Your anger does not help you and the subject of your anger usually pays less attention to what you are saying than if you would have said it tactfully and patiently. Becoming angry merely causes harm to your health and makes you feel miserable.
Activity is the presence of function - character is the record of function.
A good character is, in all cases, the fruit of personal exertion. It is not inherited from parents, it is not created by external advantages, it is no necessary appendage of birth, wealth, talents or station; but it is the result of one’s own endeavors.
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth , for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.
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