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 |
Franz Boas, fully Franz Uri Boas
The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.
Ancestry | Behavior | Character | Individual | Wisdom |
We are what we are; we cannot be truly other than ourselves. We reach perfection not by copying, much less by aiming at originality, by constantly and steadily working out the life which is common to all, according to the character which God has given us.
Character | Copying | God | Life | Life | Originality | Perfection | Wisdom | God |
The press, important as is its office, is but the servant of the human intellect, and its ministry is for good or for evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill which grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill he hopper with poisoned grain, and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.
Character | Death | Evil | Good | Important | Office | Will | Wisdom |
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 |
Architecture has much to teach about the art of staying married, for the basic laws of building are, likewise, the basic laws of the home. A good foundation and balanced proportion are essential. Honest materials are needed, for you cannot build a noble building out of cheap, unworthy materials and you cannot build a home to stand against the stormy winds or worries unless you build it with the simple virtues of faithfulness and loyalty to one another.
Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.
Association | Character | Education | Honesty | Humanity | Man | Men | Organization | Race | Wisdom | Association |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms, Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Action | Beginning | Character | Death | Earth | Growth | Inheritance | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Object | Sense | Struggle | War | Wisdom |
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke
Pride, like ambition, is sometimes virtuous and sometimes vicious, according the character in which it is found, and the object to which it is directed. As a principle, it is the parent of almost every virtue and every vice - everything that pleases and displeases in mankind; and as the effects are so very different, nothing is more easy than to discover, even to ourselves, whether the pride that produces them is virtuous or vicious the first object of virtuous pride is rectitude, and the next independence.
Ambition | Character | Mankind | Nothing | Object | Pride | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Parent | Vice |
John W. Daniel, fully John Warwick Daniel
Grand and manifold as were its phases, there is yet no difficulty in understanding the character of Washington. He was no Veiled Prophet. He never acted a part. Simple, natural, and unaffected, his life lies before us - a fair and open manuscript. He disdained the arts which wrap power in mystery in order to magnify it. He practiced the profound diplomacy of truthful speech - the consummate tact of direct attention. Looking ever to the All-Wise Disposer of events, he relied on that Providence which helps men by giving them high hearts and hopes to help themselves with the means which their Creator has put at their service. There was no infirmity in his conduct over which charity must fling its veil; no taint of selfishness from which purity averts her gaze; no dark recess of intrigue that must be lit up with colored panegyric; no subterranean passage to be trod in trembling, lest there be stirred the ghost of a buried crime.
Attention | Character | Charity | Conduct | Crime | Difficulty | Diplomacy | Events | Giving | Intrigue | Life | Life | Means | Men | Mystery | Order | Power | Providence | Purity | Selfishness | Service | Speech | Tact | Understanding | Wisdom | Wise |
It is a very serious duty, perhaps of all duties the most serious, to look into one's own character and conduct, and accurately read one's own heart. It is virtually looking into eternity, and all its vast and solemn realities, which must appear delightful or awful, according as the heart appears to be conformed or not conform to God.
Character | Conduct | Duty | Eternity | God | Heart | Wisdom |
Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell
When a man thinks he is reading the character of another, he is often unconsciously betraying his own; and this is especially the case with those persons whose knowledge of the world is of such sort that it results in extreme distrust of men.
Character | Distrust | Extreme | Knowledge | Man | Men | Reading | Wisdom | World |