This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Do not let the hero in our soul perish, in the lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it impossible, it's yours.
Faith is the very heroism and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity but a faculty. Faith is a power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action; the hero acts - an immense difference.
A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero - the wise, the good, or the great man - very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.
Art | Education | Good | Hero | Light | Man | Soul | Wise | Art |
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Adventure | Day | Hero | Man | Power | Rites | Wonder | World |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who, by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
Good | Hero | Indigestion | Light | Man |
May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.
Doubt | Heart | Insincerity | Life | Life | Man | Self | Obstacle |
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
Character | Contradiction | Good | Impulse | Individual | Mankind | Obedience | Time |
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill.
Crime | Divinity | Infamy | Man | Nature | Nothing | Religion | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought | Vice |
Dolores Ibarruri, aka “La Pasaonaria”
It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.
Every hero is somebody else's villain. Heroism and villainy are just two sides of the same coin.
Hero |