This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Love confronts hate in the one way hate cannot comprehend, with something beyond itself - with compassion. Hate cannot go beyond itself. It draws its strength from the self's defense of self. Love lives to go beyond itself, drawing strength from that very act. Love can thus comprehend hate, integrating it into something larger. Slowly, hate is defeated as a grain of salt dissolves into the sweetness of a pond.
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Hate | Listening | Love | Means | People | Sound | Talking |
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Hate | Listening | Love | Means | People | Sound | Talking |
If appeasing our enemies is not the answer, neither is hating them... Somewhere between the extremes of appeasement and hate there is a place for courage and strength to express themselves in magnanimity and charity, and this is the place we must find.
Charity | Courage | Hate | Magnanimity | Strength |
Anger is always concerned with individuals... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any informer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot.
Elderly Men... have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think,’ but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefor suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but... love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive... They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past... Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen to them.
Business | Day | Evil | Experience | Future | Hate | Hope | Kindness | Life | Life | Little | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Pity | Reason | Weakness | Will | Old |
Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately... They have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one’s life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward... They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.
Day | Deeds | Expectation | Future | Hate | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Men | Nothing | Past | Precept | Usefulness | Youth | Deeds | Youth | Expectation | Friends | Think | Value |
Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true. Venerable, because it has perfect knowledge of man; lovable because it promises the true good.
Despise | Fear | Good | Hate | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Men | Reason | Religion | Respect | Respect |
We hate some people because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.