This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch
Young people imagine there is great value in fame. Those with life experience know that in truth publicity is extremely short-lived. The nature of the world is that every piece of news makes an impression for only a very short time. After those few minutes the impression is erased and quickly forgotten. It is as if it never was.
Character | Experience | Fame | Impression | Life | Life | Nature | News | People | Time | Truth | World | Value |
Man cannot live by bread alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living. Life is something more than these, and the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can come into his life - service for others.
Character | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Money | Power | Service | Truth |
A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
To love to preach is one thing - to love those to whom we preach, quite another.
Hypocrisy is folly. It is much easier, safer, and pleasanter to be the thing which a man aims to appear, than to keep up the appearance of what he is not.
Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed, a Columbus of the skies.
Stuart Cloete, fully Edward Fairly Stuart Graham
Happiness is a hard thing because it is achieved only by making others happy.
Mutability is the a badge of infirmity. It is seldom that a man continues to wish and design the same thing two days alike.
Character | Design | Man | Mutability |
The nobles charities, the best fruits of learning, the richest discoveries, the best institutions of law and justice, every greatest thing the world has seen, represents, more or less directly, the fruitfulness and creativeness of religion.
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
Strive to know thyself, the most difficult thing to know that can be imagined.
Humility is not a weak and timid quality; it must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit. There is such a thing as an honest pride and self-respect. Though we may be servants of all, we should be servile to none.
Chazon Ish, named Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz
All beginnings are difficult, but there is nothing that stands in the way when you have a strong will to accomplish. The essential thing is to be sincerely resolved to be successful.
The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed; and discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age.
Age | Better | Character | Discussion | Error | Good | Passion | Personality | Truth |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. This is the only preparation which in the long run amounts to anything.
Character | Experience | Future | Meaning | Present | Time |