This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Hypocrisy is folly. It is much easier, safer, and pleasanter to be the thing which a man aims to appear, than to keep up the appearance of what he is not.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
The knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth.
Character | Discussion | Friend | Truth | Will |
The essence of all education is self-discovery and self-control. When education helps an individual to discover his own powers and limitations and, shows him how to get out of his heredity its largest and best possibilities, it will fulfill its real function, when children are taught not merely to know things but particularly to know themselves, not merely how to do things but especially how to compel themselves to do things, they may be said to be really educated. For this sort of education there is demanded rigorous discipline of the powers of observation, of the reason, and especially of the will.
Character | Children | Control | Discipline | Discovery | Education | Heredity | Individual | Observation | Reason | Self | Self-control | Will |
Whatever a person does without enthusiasm and joy is not truly considered doing. When a person lacks joy for what he is doing, everything he does will be difficult for him and he will not do it properly.
Character | Enthusiasm | Joy | Will |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Whoever undertakes a long Journey, if he be wise, makes it his Business to find out an agreeable Companion. How cautious then should He be, who is to take a Journey for Life, whose Fellow-Traveler must not part with him but at the Grave; his Companion at Bed and Board and Sharer of all the Pleasures and Fatigues of his Journey; as the Wife must be to the Husband! She is no such Sort of Ware, that a Man can be rid of when he pleases: When once that’s purchas’d, no Exchange, no Sale, no Alienation can be made: She is an inseparable Accident to Man: Marriage is a Noose, which, fasten’d about the Neck, runs the closer, and fits more uneasy by our struggling to get loose: ‘Tis a Gordian Knot which none can unty, and being twisted with our Thread of Life, nothing but the Schyth of Death can cut it.
Accident | Alienation | Business | Character | Death | Grave | Husband | Journey | Life | Life | Man | Marriage | Nothing | Wife | Wise | Business |
Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.