This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce in a country like ours, general prosperity, content and cheerfulness.
Character | Cheerfulness | Health | Labor | Prosperity |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Keep the middle path of strength and virtue, lest you be overwhelmed by misfortune or corrupted by pleasant fortune. All that falls short or goes too far ahead, has contempt for happiness, and gains not the reward for labor done. It rests in your own hands what shall be the nature of the fortune which you choose to form for yourself. For all fortune which seems difficult, either exercises virtue, or corrects or punishes vice.
Contempt | Fortune | Labor | Misfortune | Nature | Reward | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Misfortune |
Georges Duhamel, Pen name Denis Thevenin
It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely.
J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty
I have no complex about wealth. I have worked hard for my money, producing things people need. I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than politicians or soldiers.
Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability.
Behavior | Contempt | Familiarity | Ideas | Wisdom |
A philosopher, who purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and more engaging colors, if by accident he falls into error, goes not farther; but renewing his appeal to common sense, and the natural sentiments of the; mind, returns into the right path, and secures himself from any dangerous illusions.
Accident | Common Sense | Error | Mankind | Mind | Right | Sense | Wisdom |
Among well-bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt of others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority.
Attention | Authority | Contempt | Conversation | Deference | People | Superiority | Vehemence | Wisdom |
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
We know that we are not limited by the accident of our birth or the timing of it, and we recognize the truth that we have always been around. We can reinhabit time and own our story as a species. We were present back there in the fireball and the rains that streamed down on this still molten planet, and in the primordial seas. We remember that in our mother’s womb, where we wear vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. We remember that. That information is in us and there is a deep, deep kinship in us, beneath the outer layers of our neocortex or what we learned in school. There is a deep wisdom, a bondedness with our creation, and an ingenuity far beyond what we think we have. And when we expand our notions of what we are to include this story, we will have a wonderful time and we will survive.
Accident | Birth | Ingenuity | Mother | Present | Story | Time | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Ingenuity | Think |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
War is a profession by which a man cannot live honorably; an employment by which the soldier, if he would reap any profit, is obliged to be false, rapacious, and cruel!
Those who obtain riches by labor, care, and watching, know their value. Those who impart them to sustain and extend knowledge, virtue, and religion, know their use. Those who lose them by accident or fraud know their vanity. And those who experience the difficulties and dangers of preserving them know their perplexities.
Accident | Care | Experience | Fraud | Knowledge | Labor | Religion | Riches | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Riches |
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country.
Cheerfulness | Happy | Health | Labor | Prosperity | Wisdom |