This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expended from it.
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect. For all these effects - agreeableness of one’s condition and even the promotion of the happiness of others - could have been also brought about by other causes, so that for this there would have been no need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this alone that the supreme and unconditional good can be found. The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
Action | Good | Law | Need | Nothing | Present | Will | Worth | Happiness |
Nine times out of ten, the best that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my acquaintance I never knew a man to be drowned who was worth saving.
Acquaintance | Man | Worth |
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
Worth |
An acre of performance is worth the whole world of promise.
A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory [Allegory: a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another, a symbolic narrative].
It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to.
Better | Character | Contemplation | Feelings | Individual | Life | Life | Object | Race | Rights | Uniformity | Worth |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
Creativity requires the freedom to consider "unthinkable" alternatives, to doubt the worth of cherished practices. Every organization, every society is under the spell of assumptions so familiar that they are never questioned, least of all by those most intimately involved.
Creativity | Doubt | Freedom | Organization | Society | Worth | Society |
The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
Worth |
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snails eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about.
Extreme | Light | Man | Mystery | Science | Sense | Wonder | Worth |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
Worth |