This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions.
Ability | Absurd | Bitterness | Choice | Consequences | Giving | God | Life | Life | Meaning | Nothing | God |
Power is defined [as] the ability to make certain things happen, or to prevent certain things from happening.
The greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action.
Supreme Being is as impartial as the sun. If one flower bud opens when the run arise and another does not, it is due to its own preparedness and not to any partiality of the sun. Similarly, Divine Grace flows everywhere, always; it is only man’s willingness and ability to respond to it that varies. Supreme Being cannot be propitiated. Being all benevolence, it can not be induced to become more benevolent to one than to another or in one instance than in another. All things manifest Supreme Being in its innumerable aspects; all things issue forth from it and return to it.
Ability | Benevolence | Grace | Man | Partiality |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Wealth is the product of man's ability to think.
Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
Ability |
The primary cause of success in life is the ability to set and achieve goals. That’s why the people who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do. You either work to achieve your own goals or you work to achieve someone else’s.
Ability | Cause | Goals | Life | Life | People | Success | Work |
A dog is not considered good because of his barking, and a man is not considered clever because of his ability to talk.
Real wealth is determined by the level of your ability to live our your dreams.
Virtue in a rich person is the ability to give, in a poor man it is the refusal to beg, in a man of high position it is a humble attitude towards fellowmen, and in a man of low position it is the ability to see through life.
Time goes by; reputation increases, ability declines.
Ability | Reputation | Time |
Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person.
Ability | Fear | Life | Life | Perfection | Right | Success | Will | Wrong | Learn |
Time goes by: reputation increases, ability decline.
Ability | Reputation | Time |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
Let us not get so busy or live so fast that we can't listen to the music of the meadow or the symphony that glorifies the forest. Some things in the world are far more important than wealth; one of them is the ability to enjoy simple things.
The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago.
Ability | Genius | God | Innocence | Meaning | Means | Wonder | God | Old |