This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe
From the very beginning of a person’s life one learns that the purpose of life is not uninterrupted pleasure. Every infant suffers pains and illnesses. We should not perceive illness and pain as negative. Suffering teaches us humility. We learn that we do not have complete power over ourselves.
Beginning | Character | Humility | Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Power | Purpose | Purpose | Suffering | Learn |
Rabbi Akiva, fully Rebbe Akiva ben Yosef NULL
Rejoice in adversity even more than in prosperity, for suffering brings forgiveness of sin.
Adversity | Character | Forgiveness | Prosperity | Sin | Suffering | Wisdom | Forgiveness |
Abraham ben Moses ben Maimon, aka Rabbi Avraham Maimuni, aka Rabbeinu Avraham ben ha-Rambam NULL
Once you are used to something, you feel some suffering if you lack it. Be very careful before making something a habit.
Give up the notion that there is a final state to attain. Spiritual life consists of ongoing practice undertaken as a lifetime work. This realization breeds humility, especially when we realize that in our initial infatuation with enlightenment, we underestimate the amount of inner work necessary to free us from our addictive patterns of thought and behavior.
Behavior | Character | Enlightenment | Humility | Life | Life | Practice | Thought | Work | Thought |
Harry Blackmun, fully Harold "Harry" Andrew Blackmun
With our finite minds we cannot presume to know if there is a Purpose. We sense, however, the presence of something greater than we can comprehend, a force as yet unknown to us - perhaps even to be unknown. So we accept our situation, learn from it, and do the best we can, resting on faith, despair, or cynicism, depending on the individual. Overriding all this must be an obligation - self-imposed or externally impressed - to do the best one can for others, to relieve suffering and to exercise compassion. We are all in this together, for life is a common, not an individual, endeavor.
Character | Compassion | Cynicism | Despair | Faith | Force | Individual | Life | Life | Obligation | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Sense | Suffering | Learn |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
The trouble of the many and various aims of mortal men bring them much care, and herein they go forward by different paths but strive to reach one end, which is happiness. And that good is that, to which if any man attain, he can desire nothing further... Happiness is a state which is made perfect by the union of all good things. This end all men seek to reach, as I said, though by different paths. For there is implanted by nature in the minds of men a desire for the true good; but error leads them astray towards false goods by wrong paths.
Aims | Care | Character | Desire | Error | Good | Man | Men | Mortal | Nature | Nothing | Wrong | Trouble | Happiness |
Chayim of Volozhin, also Chaim ben Yuitzchok of Volozhin or Chaim Ickovits NULL
When you suffer yourself, it is easier to feel the suffering of others.
True compassion is utterly neutral and is moved by suffering of every sort, not tied to right and wrong, attachment and aversion.
Character | Compassion | Right | Suffering | Wrong |
If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.
J. L. M. Curry, fully Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry
A state to prosper, must be built on foundations of moral character, and, this character is the principal element of its strength, and the only guaranty of its permanence and prosperity.
Character | Prosperity | Strength |
Everyone suffers. But many do not take it to heart that the suffering comes as a punishment for transgressions, rather they consider it accidental. The proper attitude is that suffering is an atonement. With this realization a person appreciates that suffering in this world saves him suffering in the next.
Character | Heart | Punishment | Suffering | World |
Of all the animals on earth, man has shown himself to be the most cruel and brutal. He is the only animal that will create instruments of death for his own destruction. Man is the only animal on all the earth that has ever been known to burn its young as a sacrifice to appease the wrath of some imaginary deity. He is the only one that will build homes, towns, and cities at such a cost in sacrifice and suffering and turn around and destroy them in war.
Character | Cost | Death | Destroy | Earth | Man | Sacrifice | Suffering | War | Will |