This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Garrison Keillor, fully Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor
Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy and your joy in you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.
Character | Difficulty | Happy | Intelligence | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Purpose | Purpose | Service | Success | Happiness |
Otto Kahn, fully Otto Hermann Kahn
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are... The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.
Character | Cost | Freedom | Present | Submission | Surrender |
Anthony Kenny, fully Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny
It is characteristic of our age to endeavour to replace virtues by technology. That is to say, wherever possible we strive to use methods of physical or social engineering to achieve goals which our ancestors thought attainable only by the training of character. Thus we try so far as possible to make contraception take the place of chastity, and anesthetics to take the place of fortitude; we replace resignation by insurance policies and munificence by the Welfare state. It would be idle romanticism to deny that such techniques and institutions are often less painful and more efficient methods of achieving the goods and preventing the evils which unaided virtue once sought to achieve and avoid. But it would be an equal and opposite folly to hope that the take-over of virtue by technology may one day be complete.
Age | Character | Chastity | Day | Folly | Fortitude | Goals | Hope | Munificence | Resignation | Technology | Thought | Training | Virtue | Virtue | Thought |
Goodness does not more certainly make men happy, than happiness makes them good. We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once; while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.
Ambition | Character | Distinguish | Good | Happy | Men | Prosperity | Ambition | Happiness |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Adversity | Ambition | Character | Grief | Joy | Men | Necessity | Observation | Passion | Prosperity |
We must consider what person stands for; - which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self.
Character | Consciousness | Present | Reason | Reflection | Self | Taste | Thinking | Will |
A person is a success if he works on the trait of sincerely desiring other people’s success. It is easy to talk as if you wish someone success but inwardly hope he fails. In general you should know that without hard work and wisdom it is impossible to reach any virtue, and you will remain with your natural tendencies and behavior.
Behavior | Character | Hope | People | Success | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Wisdom | Work |
James Mackintosh, fully Sir James Mackintosh
Selfishness is a vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and as such, condemned by self-love.
Character | Love | Self | Selfishness | Self-love | Happiness | Vice |
Men’s happiness or misery is most part of their own making.