This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
Ability | Character | Individual | Need | Wisdom |
J.M. Barrie, fully Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet
If you have it, you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have
Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict.
Doubt | Effort | Energy | Evolution | Life | Life | Power | Will | Wisdom | Work | World |
A complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why we should act and feel towards others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy.
Philosophy | Power | Wisdom |
Anthony of Sourozh, fully Archbishop Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh NULL
People are much greater and stronger than we imagine, and when unexpected tragedy comes we see them often grow to a stature that is far beyond anything we imagined. We must remember that people are capable of greatness, of courage, but not in isolation. They need the conditions of solidly linked human unit in which everyone is prepared to bear the burden of others.
Courage | Greatness | Isolation | Need | People | Tragedy | Wisdom |
Much has been said of the wisdom of old age. Old age is wise, I grant, for itself, but not wise for the community. It is wise in declining new enterprises, for it has not the power nor the time to execute them; wise in shrinking from difficulty, for it has not the strength to overcome it; wise in avoiding danger, for it lacks the faculty of ready and swift action, by which dangers are parried and converted into advantages. But this is not wisdom for mankind at large, by whom new enterprises must be undertaken, dangers met, and difficulties surmounted.
Action | Age | Danger | Difficulty | Mankind | Old age | Power | Strength | Time | Wisdom | Wise | Old |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
Art | Cause | Effort | Ideas | Man | Nature | Power | Wisdom |
Silence, when nothing need be said, is the eloquence of discretion.
Discretion | Need | Nothing | Silence | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina. The imagination is but the faculty of glassing images; and it is with exceeding difficulty, and by the imperative will of the reasoning faculty resolved to mislead it, that it glasses images which have no prototype in truth and nature.
Custom | Difficulty | Imagination | Judgment | Nature | Observation | Power | Precision | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Precision |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world’s uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man.
There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do.
Action | Appreciation | Beauty | Character | Correctness | Education | Efficiency | Evidence | Habit | Manners | Mother | Power | Precision | Reflection | Sound | Thought | Wisdom | Worth | Precision | Appreciation | Beauty | Thought |
The man who can really, in living union of the mind and heart, converse with God through nature, finds in the material forms around him, a source of power and happiness inexhaustible, and like the life of angels. The highest life and glory of man is to be alive unto God; and when this grandeur of sensibility to him, and this power of communion with him is carried, as the habit of the soul, into the forms of nature, then the walls of our world are as the gates of heaven.
Angels | Glory | God | Habit | Heart | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Power | Sensibility | Soul | Wisdom | World | God | Happiness |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.
Genius | Labor | Men | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Will | Wisdom | Words |
It doth not yet appear what we shall be. We lie here in our nest, unfledged and weak, guessing dimly at our future, and scarce believing what even now appears. But the power is in us, and that power is finally to be revealed. And what a revelation will that be!
Future | Power | Revelation | Will | Wisdom |
The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the chief wall of defense around property and life. With the progress of society, this power of opinion is taking the place of arms.
Defense | Judgment | Life | Life | Men | Opinion | Power | Progress | Property | Society | Wisdom | World |
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements - the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself - are, in the environment, failures.