This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
W. T. Grant, fully William Thomas Grant
It must be obvious to those who take the time to look at human life that its greatest values lie not in getting things, but in doing them, in doing them together, in all working toward a common aim, in the experience of comradeship, of warmhearted 100% human life.
Character | Experience | Life | Life | Time |
I have found it helpful to keep constantly in mind that there are really two entries to be made for every transaction - one in terms of immediate dollars and cents, the other in terms of goodwill.
Grief is a stone that bears one down, but two bear it lightly.
A person not aware of his faults and failings will not work on self-improvement. But if he overexaggerates the extent of his negative qualities and behavior, he will become discouraged and his discouragement will prevent him from improving.
Behavior | Character | Improvement | Qualities | Self | Self-improvement | Will | Work |
For... what liberty is; there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he useth in his mind, that is, what he himself meaneth when he saith an action... is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be satisfied... that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external impediments. But to those that out of custom speak not what they conceive, but what they heard, and are not able, or will not take the pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument can be sufficient, because experience and matter of fact are not verified by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory.
Absence | Action | Argument | Character | Custom | Experience | Liberty | Man | Memory | Men | Mind | Reflection | Sense | Will | Words | Think |
Blame is one of the surest ways to stay in a problem.
What is called affluence - the consequence of the type of rapid economic development which occurred from about the middle of the nineteenth century - is in a real sense an abundance not just of serious problems which machines cannot solve, but of hopeless poverty: the physical insecurity, personal unhappiness, the intensified morality, the sense of being dwarfed by vast and uncontrollable physical, mechanical and corporate structures, the hatred and contempt of other peoples, the lack of opportunity for contemplation, the loss of community life.
Abundance | Character | Contemplation | Contempt | Insecurity | Life | Life | Machines | Morality | Opportunity | Poverty | Problems | Sense | Unhappiness | Loss |
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.
J. T. Headley, fully Joel T. Headley
To refine and polish is a part of our work in this world.
It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
A simple heart will love all that is most precious on earth, husband or wife, parent or child, brother or friend, without marring its singleness; external things will have no attraction save inasmuch as they lead souls to Him; all exaggeration or unreality, affection and falsehood must pass away from such a one, as the dews dry up before the sunshine. The single motive is to please God, and hence arises total indifference as to what others say and think, so that words and actions are perfectly simple and natural, as in his sight.
Character | Earth | Exaggeration | Falsehood | Friend | God | Heart | Husband | Indifference | Love | Wife | Will | Words | Parent |
There are two kinds of artist in this world; those that work because the spirit is in them, and they cannot be silent if they would, and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to other the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.
Admiration | Beauty | Character | Desire | Spirit | Work | World | Beauty |
Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"
Whatever can lead an intelligent being to the exercise or habit of mental enjoyment, contributes more to his happiness than the highest sensual or mere bodily pleasures. The one feeds the soul, while the other, for the most part, only exhausts the frame, and too often injures the immortal part... Let all seen enjoyments lead to the unseen fountain from whence they flow.
Richard M. Hare, fully Richard Mervyn Hare
It is, most fundamentally, because moral judgments are universablizable that we can speak of moral thought as rational (to universalize is to give the reason); and their prescriptivity is very intimately connected with our freedom to form our own moral opinions (only those free to think and act need a prescriptive language).
Character | Freedom | Language | Need | Reason | Thought | Think | Thought |