This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What we take for virtues is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry know how to arrange; and it is not always from valor and from chastity that men are valiant, an that women are chaste.
Chastity | Fortune | Industry | Men | Nothing | Valor | Valor |
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.
I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries.
Children | Education | Enough | Gratitude | Health | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Money | Obligation | Parents | Struggle | Sympathy | World | Old | Think |
If the higher companionship which love should be does not make men and women nobler, more generous, more ready to sacrifice even their beautiful life for a lofty purpose, there is a suspicion that their love is not love but a combination of egoisms.
Life | Life | Love | Men | Purpose | Purpose | Sacrifice | Suspicion | Companionship |
This world, sir, is very clearly a place of torment and penance, a place where the fool flourishes and the good and wise are hated and persecuted, a place where men and women torture one another in the name of love; where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing.
Body | Children | Duty | Education | Good | Love | Men | Torture | Wise | World |
George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will... There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
Better | Birth | Children | Conquest | Death | Loneliness | Marriage | Men | Sacrifice | Terror | Waiting | War | Understand |
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Men |
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters which break down the spirit of man and prostrate him in the dust seem to call forth all the energies of the softer sex, and give such intrepidity and elevation to their character that at times it approaches to sublimity.
Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
In the Kingdom of God there are no claims, but only love, which, as something which cannot be coordinated into a given structure, knows no calculations. All claimfulness is overcome because it is realized that complete dependence and freedom, human dignity and divine grace, are not opposites as the autonomous self-centered man supposes.
Dependence | Dignity | Freedom | God | Grace | Love | Man | Self | God |
Half the spiritual difficulties that men and women suffer arise from a morbid state of health.
The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.
Consciousness | Mind | Punishment |
No woman has ever told the truth of her life. The autobiographies of most famous women are a series of accounts of the outward existence, of petty details and anecdotes which give no realization of their real life. For the great moments of joy or agony they remain strangely silent.
Agony | Existence | Famous | Joy | Life | Life | Truth | Woman |
Commerce links all mankind in one common brother hood of mutual dependence and interests.
Commerce | Dependence | Mankind |
There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence upon one's self.
Dependence | Self |