This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let us unite contemplation with action. In the harmony of the two, lies the perfection of character. They are not contradictory and incompatible, but mutually helpful to each other.
Action | Character | Contemplation | Harmony | Perfection | Contemplation |
How mysterious in this human life, with all its diversities of contrast and compensation; this web of checkered destinies,; this sphere of manifold allotment, where man lives in his greatness and grossness, a little lower than the angels, a little higher than the brutes.
Angels | Character | Compensation | Contrast | Greatness | Life | Life | Little | Man |
Any person who thinks rationally will not feel discouraged in the area of personal growth and obtaining wisdom. He realizes that perfection is impossible and not required of him. Constant improvement is what is required and everyone has the ability to improve.
Ability | Character | Growth | Improvement | Perfection | Will | Wisdom |
The chimerical pursuit of perfection is always linked to some important deficiency, frequently the inability to love.
Character | Important | Love | Perfection |
Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature’s grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.
Character | Contemplation | Greatness | Man | Nature | Contemplation |
A nation's greatness resides not in her material resources, but in her will, faith, intelligence, and moral forces.
Character | Faith | Greatness | Intelligence | Will |
The Godhead is impassable; for where there is perfection and unity, there can be no suffering. The capacity to suffer arises where there is imperfection, disunity and separation from an embracing totality; and the capacity is actualized to the extent that imperfection, disunity and separateness are accompanied by an urge towards the intensification of these creaturely conditions. For the individual who achieves unity within his own organism and union with the divine Ground, there is an end of suffering. The goal of creation is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness and that infatuating urge-to-separateness which results in suffering, through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality.
Capacity | Character | Eternal | Imperfection | Individual | Knowledge | Perfection | Reality | Suffering | Unity | Wholeness |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.
Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |
Among the other excellencies of man, this is one, that he can form the image of perfection much beyond what he has experience of in himself, and is not limited in his conception of wisdom and virtue.
Character | Experience | Man | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
The conscience of every man recognizes courage as the foundation of manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human character.
Character | Conscience | Courage | Man | Manliness | Perfection |
There is no right without parallel duty, no liberty without the supremacy of the law, no high destiny without earnest perseverance, no greatness without self-denial.
Character | Destiny | Duty | Greatness | Law | Liberty | Perseverance | Right | Self | Self-denial |
One of the marks of true greatness is the ability to develop greatness in others.
The way to educate youngsters is to elevate them by pointing out the greatness that can be theirs if they utilize their potential.
Bruno Lessing, pseudonymn for Randolph Edgar Block
The most agreeable of all companions is a simple, frank man, without any high pretensions to an oppressive greatness - one who loves life, and understands the use of it; obliging alike at all hours; above all, of a golden temper, and steadfast as an anchor.
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
An ardent love and admiration of virtue seems to imply the existence of something opposite to it, and it seems highly probably that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character could not be generated without the impressions of disapprobation which arise from the spectacle of moral evil.
Admiration | Beauty | Character | Evil | Existence | Love | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |