This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe
Every person in the world waits for signs of recognition and affection from others.
The most generous and merciful in judgment upon the faults of others, are always the most free from faults themselves.
How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.
How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really consider a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affection is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.
It is better to give love. Hatred is a low and degrading emotion and is so poisonous that no man is strong enough to use it safely. The hatred we think we are directing against some person or thing or system has a devilish way of turning back upon us. When we seek revenge we administer slow poison to ourselves. When we administer affection it is astonishing what magical results we obtain.
Better | Character | Enough | Love | Man | Revenge | System | Think |
There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness.
Admiration | Character | Forbearance | Forgiveness | Love | Men | Nothing | Pity |
Charles Alexander Eastman, first named Ohiyesa
The Indians were religious from the first moments of life. From the moment of the mother’s recognition that she had conceived to the end of the child’s second year of life, which was the ordinary duration of lactation, it was supposed by us that the mother’s spiritual influence was supremely important. Her attitude and secret meditations must be such to instill into the receptive soul of the unborn child the love of the Great Mystery and a sense of connectedness with all creation. Silence and isolation are the rule of life for the expectant mother... Silence, love, reverence - this is the trinity of first lessons, and to these she later adds generosity, courage and chastity.
Character | Chastity | Courage | Generosity | Important | Influence | Isolation | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Mystery | Reverence | Rule | Sense | Silence | Soul | Child |
A person’s soul has a spark of divinity. Forgetting one’s lofty identity, one might pick up major faults and bad habits. Therefore remember at all times that you are a child of the great King and it is not befitting to act in a lowly and degrading manner.
He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety, as accepted by other people.
Character | Conduct | Glory | Law | People | Piety | Reality | Reverence | Wit |
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues.
Character | Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Trouble |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Faults will turn to good, provided we use them to our own humiliation, without slackening in the effort to correct ourselves. Discouragement serves no possible purpose; it is simply the despair of wounded self-love. The real way of profiting by the humiliation of one’s own faults is to face them in their true hideousness, without ceasing to hope in God, while hoping nothing from self.
Character | Despair | Effort | God | Good | Hope | Love | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Self-love | Will |
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, born Margaret Power
One of the almost numberless advantages of goodness is, that it blinds its possessor to many of those faults in others which could not fail to be detected by the morally defective. A consciousness of unworthiness renders people extremely quick-sighted in discerning the vices of their neighbors; as person scan easily discover in others the symptoms of those diseases beneath which they themselves have suffered.
Character | Consciousness | People |