This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust.
Character | Faith | Hero | Innocence | Soul | Strength | Trust | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Worth |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Certain sins manifests themselves as their mirror opposites which the sinner is able to persuade himself are virtues. Thus Gluttony can manifest itself as Daintiness, Lust as Prudery, Sloth and Senseless Industry, Envy as Hero Worship.
Envy | Gluttony | Hero | Industry | Lust | Sloth | Wisdom | Worship |
The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.
The practice of perseverance is the discipline of the noblest virtues. To run well, we must run to the end. It is not the fighting but the conquering that gives a hero his title to renown.
Discipline | Fighting | Hero | Perseverance | Practice | Title | Wisdom |
The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis.
Action | Circumstances | Cult | God | Hero | Individual | Society | Thought | God | Thought |
In the grossly distorted individualism of today, we are incapable of imagining the selflessly disinterested hero. This may not matter; we may think we can do without him. But what is also means is that we are incapable of imagining the selflessly disinterested hero in ourselves who would give himself to a cause.
A hero… is not a hero until he is recognized as one. This means that the actualization of the hero is a two-way projection. First the hero must project by way of his deeds, his style, his character. When the projection registers, an imaginative process begins to remake the hero to fit as fully as possible the symbolic weight of his image. Legend and myth take over the historical personage, and through either an oral or a written tradition he is reborn in his heroic apotheosis.
Character | Deeds | Hero | Means | Myth | Style | Tradition |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A great-souled hero must transcend the slavish thinking of those around him.
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Do not let the hero in our soul perish, in the lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it impossible, it's yours.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action; the hero acts - an immense difference.
A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero - the wise, the good, or the great man - very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.
Art | Education | Good | Hero | Light | Man | Soul | Wise | Art |
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Adventure | Day | Hero | Man | Power | Rites | Wonder | World |