This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
David J. Schwartz, fully David Joseph Schwartz
The test of a successful person is not an ability to eliminate all problems before they arise, but to meet and work out difficulties when they do arise. We must be willing to make an intelligent compromise with perfection lest we wait forever before taking action. It's still good advice to cross bridges as we come to them.
Ability | Action | Advice | Good | Perfection | Problems | Work |
The beginning of greatness is to be little, the increase of greatness is to be less, and the perfection of greatness is to be nothing.
Beginning | Greatness | Little | Nothing | Perfection |
Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.
Control | Nature | Perfection | Will |
Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
Harmony | Perfection |
Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect.
Nothing | Perfection |
Man’s task is to reconcile liberty with service, reason with faith. This is the deepest wisdom man can attain. It is our destiny to serve, to surrender. We have to conquer in order to succumb; we have to acquire in order to give away; we have to triumph in order to be overwhelmed. Man has to understand in order to believe, to know in order to accept. The aspiration is to obtain; the perfection is to dispense. This is the meaning of death: the ultimate self-dedication to the divine. Death so understood will not be distorted by the craving for immortality, for this act of giving away is reciprocity on man’s part for God’s gift of life. For the pious man it is a privilege to die.
Aspiration | Death | Destiny | Giving | Liberty | Man | Meaning | Order | Perfection | Pious | Reason | Reciprocity | Will | Wisdom | Aspiration | Privilege | Understand |
The deepest wisdom man can attain is to know that his destiny is to aid, to serve. We have to conquer in order to succumb; we have to acquire in order to give away; we have to triumph in order to be overwhelmed. Man has to understand in order to believe, to know in order to accept. The aspiration is to obtain; the perfection is to dispense. This is the meaning of death: the ultimate self-dedication to the divine. Death so understood will not be distorted by the craving for immortality, for the act of giving away is reciprocity on man’s part for God’s gift of life. For the pious man it is a privilege to die.
Aspiration | Death | Destiny | Giving | Man | Meaning | Order | Perfection | Pious | Reciprocity | Will | Wisdom | Aspiration | Privilege | Understand |
John Wooden, fully John Robert Wooden
Perfection is what you are striving for, but perfection is an impossibility. However, striving for perfection is not an impossibility. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts.
More than anything else I have come to see meditation as a radical act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our perfection even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness.
Benevolence | Heart | Kindness | Meditation | Perfection |
There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as Justice. Most of the other virtues are the virtues of created Beings, or accommodated to our nature as we are men. Justice is that which is practised by God himself, and to be practised in its perfection by none but him. Omniscience and Omnipotence are requisite for the full exertion of it. The one, to discover every degree of uprightness or iniquity in thoughts, words and actions. The other, to measure out and impart suitable rewards and punishments. As to be perfectly just is an attribute in the divine nature, to be so to the utmost of our abilities is the glory of a man. Such an one who has the publick administration in his hands, acts like the representative of his Maker, in recompencing the virtuous, and punishing the offender.
Administration | Glory | God | Justice | Nature | Omnipotence | Omniscience | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Words | God |
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando, also Joseph-Marie de Gérando
In an age of egoism, it is so difficult to persuade man that of all studies, the most important is that of himself. This is because egoism, like all passions, is blind. The attention of the egoist is directed to the immediate needs of which his senses give notice, and cannot be raised to those reflective needs that reason discloses to us; his aim is satisfaction, not perfection. He considers only his individual self; his species is nothing to him. Perhaps he fears that in penetrating the mysteries of his being he will ensure his own abasement, blush at his discoveries, and meet his conscience. True philosophy, always at one with moral science, tells a different tale. The source of useful illumination, we are told, is that of lasting content, is in ourselves. Our insight depends above all on the state of our faculties; but how can we bring our faculties to perfection if we do not know their nature and their laws! The elements of happiness are the moral sentiments; but how can we develop these sentiments without considering the principle of our affections, and the means of directing them? We become better by studying ourselves; the man who thoroughly knows himself is the wise man. Such reflection on the nature of his being brings a man to a better awareness of all the bonds that unite us to our fellows, to the re-discovery at the inner root of his existence of that identity of common life actuating us all, to feeling the full force of that fine maxim of the ancients: 'I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me.
Age | Attention | Awareness | Better | Blush | Existence | Force | Important | Individual | Insight | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nature | Nothing | Perfection | Reason | Reflection | Will | Wise | Awareness | Happiness |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen's unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aerial navigation; but a change in public opinion. And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.
Change | Existence | Important | Individual | Invention | Mind | Opinion | Organization | Perfection | Public |
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness.
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Supreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.
Cause | Perfection | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.
Knowledge | Man | Perfection | Soul |
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.
Absolute | Desire | Eternal | Experience | History | Knowledge | Man | Omniscience | Perfection | Wants |