This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A person who is sincerely humble will be constantly happy. A humble person realizes that nothing is owed him, and therefore feels satisfied with what he has. He does not raise his sights to receive what is above him. He constantly has peace of mind and always feels the joy of life.
Character | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | Peace | Receive | Will |
John Hay, fully John Milton Hay
They [trees] hang on from a past no theory can recover. They will survive us. The air makes their music. Otherwise, they live in savage silence, though mites and nematodes and spiders teem at their roots, and though the energy with which they feed on the sun and are able to draw water sometimes hundred of feet up their trunks and into their twigs and branches calls for a deafening volume of sound.
Character | Energy | Music | Past | Silence | Sound | Will |
John Hay, fully John Milton Hay
Who would succeed in the world should be wise in the use of his pronouns. Utter the You twenty times, where you once utter the I.
What is uttered from the heart alone will win the hearts of others to your own.
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Character | Human nature | Kindness | Nature |
Infidelity and faith look both through the perspective glass, but at contrary ends. Infidelity looks through the wrong end of the glass; and, therefore, sees those objects near which are afar off, and makes great things little - diminishing the greatest spiritual blessings, and removing far from us threatened evils. Faith looks at the right end, and brings the blessings that are far off in time close to our eye, and multiplies God’s mercies, which, in a distance, lost their greatness.
Blessings | Character | Ends | Faith | God | Greatness | Little | Looks | Right | Time | Wrong | Infidelity |
Oscar Hammerstein II, fully Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hamerstein II
Why you are born and why you are living depend entirely on what you are getting out of this world and what you are giving to it. I cannot prove that this is a balance of mathematical perfection, but my own observation of life leads me to the conclusion that there is a very real relationship, both quantitatively and qualitatively, between what you contribute and what you get out of this world.
Balance | Character | Giving | Life | Life | Observation | Perfection | Relationship | World |
Whether a revolution succeeds or miscarries, men of great hearts will always be its victims.
Character | Men | Revolution | Will |
The place where forgiveness begins is a troubled, anxious heart. You will never be able to forgive anybody until you yourself are deeply disturbed. To be able to forgive we must come down from the citadel of pride, from the stronghold of hate and anger, from the high place where all emotions that issue from one's sense of being wronged shout only for vengeance and retaliation.
Anger | Character | Emotions | Forgiveness | Hate | Heart | Pride | Retaliation | Sense | Vengeance | Will | Forgiveness | Forgive |
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
An infallible way to make your child miserable is to satisfy all his demands. Passion swells by gratification; and the impossibility of satisfying every one of his wishes will oblige you to stop short at last after he has become headstrong.
Character | Impossibility | Passion | Will | Wishes | Child |
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Character | Imagination | Reality | World |