This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.
In the century now dawning, spirituality, visionary consciousness, and the ability to build and mend human relationships will be more important for the fate and safety of this nation than our capacity to forcefully subdue an enemy. Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don't want.
Ability | Capacity | Fate | Important | Will | World | Fate |
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
It is important for you to have a goal. You simply can't get there if you don't know where you are going. Begin to build in your mind a dream. The write it down and make your goal realistic. Aim high enough that you will have to stretch your ability and your potential to reach it.
Science reveals the possibility of achieving all good, and sets mortals at work to discover what God has already done; but distrust of one's ability to gain the goodness desired and to bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one's wings and ensures failure at the outset.
Ability | Better | Distrust | Failure | God | Work | Failure | Trial | God |
Max Eastman, fully Max Forrester Eastman
It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools. We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.
Ability | Challenge | Contrast | Mankind | Poverty | Problems | Progress | Spirit | Survival | Will | Work | World | Learn |
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.
Ability | Confidence |
Maurice de Saxe, Count of Saxony
Altogether, Cavalry operations are exceedingly difficult, knowledge of the country is absolutely necessary, and ability to comprehend the situation at a glance, and an audacious spirit, are everything.
One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.
Ability | Challenge | History | People | Society | Survival | Society |
Michael Dell, fully Michael Saul Dell
Visionaries have the unique ability to dream of what's possible and then make it a reality. We are excited to watch these visionaries use technology to help students develop skills in collaboration, critical thinking and teamwork that they'll need to compete in the global economy.
Ability | Critical thinking | Global | Need | Technology | Thinking | Unique | Critical Thinking |
Michael Jordan, fully Michael Jeffrey Jordon, aka MJ, Air Jordan and His Airness
Everybody has talent, but ability takes hard work.
Ability |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
Miles Davis, fully Miles Dewey Davis III
That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.
Ability |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
It would conduce to national progress and save a great deal of time and trouble if we cultivated the habit of never supporting the resolutions either by speaking or voting for them if we had not either the intention or the ability to carry them out.