This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own.
Be and continue poor, young man, while others around you grow rich by; fraud and disloyalty; be without place or power, while others beg their way upwards; bear the pain of disappointed hopes, while others gain their by; flattery; forego the gracious pressure of the hand, for which others cringe and crawl. Wrap yourself in your own virtue, and seek a friend and your daily bread. If you have, in such a course, grown gray; with unblenched honor, bless God and die.
Character | Disloyalty | Flattery | Fraud | Friend | God | Honor | Man | Pain | Power | Virtue | Virtue | God |
John-Roger & Peter McWilliams NULL
Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do. Resentment is anger directed at others - at what they did or did not do.
Anger | Character | Guilt | Resentment |
An honor-seeker is not really interested in self-improvement. He is only interested in gaining approval from others. Hence, he will disregard any fault he has if he knows that others will not notice it. On the other hand, a person who is able to forego his honor is able to focus on truth. His only thought is to do the right thing and he is willing to sacrifice his honor for his principles. Such a person will eventually receive honor, for he will constantly work on improving himself.
Character | Fault | Focus | Honor | Improvement | Principles | Receive | Right | Sacrifice | Self | Self-improvement | Thought | Truth | Will | Work | Approval | Fault | Thought |
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is noninterference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person... Love is an attitude which determines how we relate to the world... Love is an activity of our spirit... Loving others is impossible until we love ourselves.
Character | Love | Relationship | Spirit | World |
Character is so largely affected by associations that we cannot afford to be indifferent as to who and what our friends are. They write their names in our albums, but they do more, they help make us what we are. Be therefore careful in selecting them; and when wisely selected, never sacrifice them.
A person who tries to keep everything about himself hidden will not have close friends. Building a close relationship with others requires self-disclosure.
Character | Relationship | Self | Will |
From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Character | Experience | History | Men | Learn |
We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally bound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.
Character | Feelings | Force | Men | Nature | Rest | Sympathy |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Personal relationships are a major cause of unhappiness... Trying to find successful ways of dealing with people according to their personality traits is futile and time-consuming, and it puts the emphasis on outer characteristics rather than where it belongs, which is on the inner... There is an underlying sameness to us all... Operating from the space-time continuum, it is too easy to see others as different from us, to see boundaries, to be exclusive. Operating from our spiritual center, however, is to see others as part of ourselves, to see no boundaries, to be inclusive.
Cause | Character | People | Personality | Space | Time | Unhappiness |
Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
The God-relationship determines what love is between man and man, then love is kept from pausing in any self-deception or illusion, while certainly the demand for self-abnegation and sacrifice is again made more infinite. The love which does not lead to God, the love which does not have this as its sole goal, to lead the lovers to love God, stops at the purely human judgment as to what love and what love’s sacrifice and submission are; it stops and thereby escapes the possibility of the last and most terrifying horror of the collision: that in the love relationship there are infinite differences in the idea of what love is.
Character | God | Illusion | Judgment | Love | Man | Relationship | Sacrifice | Self | Self-deception | Submission |
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
The only moral virtue of war is that it compels the capitalist system to look itself in the face and admit it is a fraud. It compels the present society to admit that it has no morals it will not sacrifice for gain.
Character | Fraud | Present | Sacrifice | Society | System | Virtue | Virtue | War | Will | Society |