This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The first step to self-knowledge is self-distrust. Nor can we attain to any kind of knowledge, except by a like process.
Character | Distrust | Knowledge | Self | Self-knowledge |
There are usually no benefits from becoming angry at others. Your anger does not help you and the subject of your anger usually pays less attention to what you are saying than if you would have said it tactfully and patiently. Becoming angry merely causes harm to your health and makes you feel miserable.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Character | Illusion | Knowledge | Self | Self-knowledge |
Without self-knowledge there can be no true humility.
Character | Humility | Knowledge | Self | Self-knowledge |
The health of the soul is to have its faculties - reason, high spirit, and desire - happily tempered, with reason in command, and reining in both the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance.
The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be.
Character | Children | Experience | Health | Land | Love | Men | Self | Wisdom |
Nothing in this life, after health and virtue, is more estimable than knowledge, nor is there anything so easily attained, or so cheaply purchased, the labor, only sitting still, and the expense but time, which, if we do not spend, we cannot save.
Character | Health | Knowledge | Labor | Life | Life | Nothing | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Body | Health | Individual | Liberty | Man | Pleasure | Society | Wisdom | Happiness |
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Body | Health | Individual | Liberty | Man | Pleasure | Society | Wisdom | Happiness |