This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We love those who admire us, but not those whom we admire.
Inclination | Love | Preference | Taste | Friends |
It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them.
The generality of men have, like plants, latent properties, which chance brings to light.
When we exaggerate the tenderness of our friends towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own merit.
When we seek reconciliation with our enemies, it is commonly out of a desire to better our own condition, a being harassed and tired out with a state of war, and a fear of some ill accident which we are willing to prevent.
Desire | Gratitude | Tenderness | Friends |
Our poesy is as a Gum, which oozes From whence 'tis nourish'd: The fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck; our gentle Flame Provokes itself, and, like the current, flies Each bound it chafes.
On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.
We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks.
Friends |
There is a very large and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers, persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, and their chief pleasure in being displeased.
Any fine morning a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.
Friends |
Kautilya, aka Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta NULL
O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.
I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them.
Intelligence | Law | Understanding | Will | Friends | Understand |
My position isn’t that personalization is bad overall, it’s that we need to be careful about how it’s done. Google could do a lot more to explain its philosophy about this, without making it super easy to boost your search rankings. People need to be able to decide when they use these tools.
See how far the little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Friends |
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found, a love that makes breath poor and speech unable.
Behavior | Cause | Children | Contempt | Counsel | Desire | Duty | Father | Fear | Friend | Good | Grace | Heaven | Honor | Love | Marriage | Mind | Obedience | Pity | Pleasure | Right | Sacred | Time | Wife | Will | Wise | Wit | Woman | Friendship | Counsel | Friends |
Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
Attention | Divinity | Longing | Meditation | Mysticism | Nature | Religion | Self | Spirituality | Time | Friends |
Our course heavenward is like the plan of the zealous pilgrim of old, who for every three steps forward, took one backward.
Though woman needs the protection of one man against his whole sex, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of the metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one.
Friends |