This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.
Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men’s minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious.
Battle | Habit | Labor | Men | Strength | Suffering | Work |
Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.
Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
Creating the unity to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is a t a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life.
Business | Character | Courage | Family | Life | Life | Love | Marriage | Nobility | Skill | Strength | Unity | Business |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.
Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time, he will do it better, he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright.
Better | Cheerfulness | Endurance | Harmony | Man | Music | Past | Spirit | Strength | Time | Will | Work |
Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.
Cheerfulness | Endurance | Past | Strength |
Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
The better part of valor is discretion.
Better | Discretion | Valor | Valor |
He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.
Art | Books | Capacity | Choice | Greatness | Human nature | Life | Life | Little | Mind | Nature | Necessity | Philosophy | Politics | Strength | Weakness | World |
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
Heart | Love | Mind | Strength | Friendship |
B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
The principles of war, not merely one principle, can be condensed into a single word - "Concentration." But the truth this needs to be amplified as the concentration of strength against weakness. And for real value, it needs to be explained that the concentration of strength against weakness depends on the dispersion of your opponent's strength.
Principles | Strength | Truth | War | Weakness |
Beaumont and Fletcher, Francis Beaumont (c.1585-1614) and John Fletcher
Discretion and hardy valor are the twins of honor, and, nursed together, make a conqueror; divided, but a talker.
Discretion | Honor | Valor | Valor |
David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"
The essential ingredient of democracy is not doctrine but intelligence, not authority but reason, not cynicism but faith in men, faith in God. Our strength lies in the fearless pursuit of truth by the minds of men who are free.
Authority | Cynicism | Democracy | Doctrine | Faith | God | Intelligence | Men | Reason | Strength | Truth |
If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.
Life | Life | Responsibility | Strength |
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
I believe in the possible realization of a world in which man can be much, even if he has little; a world in which the dominant motivation of existence is not consumption; a world in which "man" is the end, first and last; a world in which man can find the way of giving a purpose to his life as well as the strength to live free and without illusions.
Existence | Giving | Life | Life | Man | Purpose | Purpose | Strength | World |