This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot or Pirqe Aboth) NULL
Who is wise? The man who can learn something from every man. Who is strong? The man who overcomes his passion. Who is rich? The man who is content with his fate. Whom do men honor? The man who honors his fellow man.
Character | Fate | Honor | Man | Men | Passion | Wise | Learn |
It is not the place that honors the man, but the man that adds luster to the place.
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
The common people are but ill judges of a man’s merits; they are slaves to fame, and their eyes are dazzled with the pomp of titles and large retinue. No wonder, then, that they bestow their honors on those who least deserve them.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. More than anything else, this new century demands new thinking: We must change our materially based analyses of the world around us to include broader, more multidimensional perspectives.
Change | Mind | Problems | Sacred | Society | Thinking | Will | World | Society |
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
A man that depends on the riches and honors of this world, forgetting God and the welfare of his soul, is like a little child that holds a fair apple in the hand, of agreeable exterior, promising goodness, but that within its rotten and full of worms.
God | Little | Man | Riches | Soul | World | Riches | God | Child |
Expect not praise without envy until you are dead. Honors bestowed on the illustrious dead have in them no admixture of envy; for the living pity the dead; and pity and envy, like oil and vinegar, assimilate not.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
American high school students of 1950 had a working vocabulary averaging 25,000 words. Today that level is 10,000. As of 1998 some 85 percent of all academic honors in the United States were taken by foreign-born students. Offspring of these students may, in turn, keep our standards from disappearing for perhaps one or two generations more, but that will be all. Sooner or later they will become we, and who will be left to comprehend that intelligence itself has deteriorated?
Intelligence | Will | Words |
True dignity is never gained by place, and never lost when honors are withdrawn.
Dignity |
Virtue is free, and as a man honors and dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser.
Man | Responsibility | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a an honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility of the chooser.
Choice | Destiny | Genius | Life | Life | Responsibility | Virtue | Virtue | Will |
He who honors a friend for the sake of gain will ultimately leave him in disgrace.
Who is wise? He who learns from all men. Who is strong? He who controls his inclinations. Who is wealthy? He who is content in his portion. Who is honored? He who honors others.
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.
There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.
Man |
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Better |