This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Arundell Charles St. John-Mildmay
Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.
Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The recognition of virtue is not less valuable from the lips of the man who hates it, since truth forces him to acknowledge it; and though he may be unwilling to take it into his inmost soul, he at least decks himself out in its trappings.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.
Character | Corruption | Enough | Knowledge | Virtue | Virtue |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.
Character | Mediocrity | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Plautus, full name Titus Maccius Plautus NULL
He who dies for virtue does not perish.
To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness.
Action | Character | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Happiness |
Never hesitate to ask where the acquisition of virtue is concerned.