This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy... In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
Character | Good | Men | Nothing | Understanding | Wealth | Value |
It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth and wisdom.
The activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest of virtuous activities; at all events the pursuit of it is thought to offer pleasures marvelous for their purity and their enduringness, and it is to be expected that those who know ill pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire. And the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity.
Events | Purity | Self | Self-sufficiency | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Thought |
The man who has been born into a position of wealth comes to look upon it as something without which he could no more live than he could live without air; he guards it as he does his very life; and so he is generally a lover of order, prudent and economical. But the man who has been born into a poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety the less.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Chance | Fortune | Life | Life | Looks | Man | Order | Position | Wealth |
The pursuit of science in itself is never materialistic. It is a search for the principles of law and order in the universe, and as such an essentially religious endeavor.
Poverty and slavery are… only two forms of – one might almost say two words for – the same thing, the essence of which is that a man’s energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others; the outcome being partly that he is overloaded with work, partly that his needs are very inadequately met.
The real measure of our wealth is our worth if we lost our money.
The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Great wealth is a great blessing to a man who knows what to do with it.
Measure wealth not by the things you have, but by the things you have for which you would not take money.
The greatest baseness of man is the pursuit of glory. But it is also the great mark of his excellence; for whatever possessions he may have on earth, whatever health and essential comfort, he is not satisfied if he has not the esteem of men.
Baseness | Comfort | Earth | Esteem | Excellence | Glory | Health | Man | Men | Possessions |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.
Beginning | Cruelty | Fear | Life | Life | Superstition | Truth | Wisdom |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power.
He that will not permit his wealth to do any good to others while he is living, prevents it from doing any good to himself when he is dead; and by an egotism that is suicidal and has a double edge, cuts himself from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness hereafter.
As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.
Good | Harmony | Heart | Impulse | Man | Phenomena | Principles |