This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Whatever may be the laws and customs of a country, women always give the tone to morals. Whether slaves or free, they reign, because their empire is that of the affections.
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
A great estate is a great disadvantage to those who do not know hot to use it, for nothing is more common than to see wealthy persons live scandalously and miserably; riches do them no service in order to virtue and happiness; it is precept and principle, not an estate, that makes a man good for something.
Character | Good | Man | Nothing | Order | Precept | Riches | Service | Virtue | Virtue | Riches |
Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch, aka Maggid of Mezeritch
I cannot teach you the ten principles of service. But a little child and a thief can show you what they are. From the child you can learn three things: He is merry for no particular reason; never for a moment is he idle; when he needs something, he demands it vigorously. The thief can instruct you in seven things: He does his service by night; if he does not finish what he has set out to do, in one night, he devotes the next night to it; he and those who work with him love one another; he risks his life for small gains; what he takes has so little value for him that he gives it up for a very small coin; he endures blows and hardship, and it matters nothing to him; he likes his trade and would not exchange it for any other.
Character | Life | Life | Little | Love | Nothing | Principles | Reason | Service | Teach | Work | Child | Learn | Value |
Katharine Anthony, fully Katharine Susan Anthony
Foremost among the barriers to equality is the system which ignores the mother’s service to Society in making a home and rearing children. The mother is still the uncharted servant of the future, who receives from her husband, at his discretion, a share in his wages.
Character | Children | Discretion | Equality | Future | Husband | Mother | Service | Society | System | Society |
Robert Briffault, fully Robert Stephen Briffault
The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.
Achievement | Character | Conquest | Fulfillment | Growth | Life | Life | Service | Happiness |
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
Age | Change | Character | Error | Labor | Life | Life | Youth |
Man cannot live by bread alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living. Life is something more than these, and the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can come into his life - service for others.
Character | Joy | Life | Life | Man | Money | Power | Service | Truth |
In Confucianism, all of us - men and women - are born soldiers. The soldier is the universal individual. No matter what you do for a living - doctor, lawyer, fisherman, thief - you are a fighter. Life is war. The war is to maintain personal integrity in a world that demands betrayal and corruption. All behavior is strategy and tactics. All relationships are martial. Marriages are military alliances.
Behavior | Betrayal | Character | Corruption | Individual | Integrity | Life | Life | Men | War | World |
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
Humanity is much more shown in our conduct towards animals, where we are irresponsible except to heaven, than towards our fellow-creatures, where we are restrained by the laws, by public opinion, and fear of retaliation.
Character | Conduct | Fear | Heaven | Humanity | Opinion | Public | Retaliation |
The golden age is not in the past, but in the future: not in the origin of human experience, but in its consummate flower: not opening in Eden, but out from Gethsemane.
Age | Character | Experience | Future | Past |