This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become wise.
Business | Leisure | Little | Man | Opportunity | Wisdom | Wise | Business |
Tomorrow comes to us untarnished by human living. No human eyes have seen it and no one can tell what it is going to be. The Chinese word for tomorrow (mingtien) means "bright day." There is the wisdom of sages and the rapture of the poets in that image.
I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Conversation | Day | Diligence | Discontent | Fidelity | God | Habit | Life | Life | Magnanimity | Self | Service | Silence | Thought | Trust | Will | Thought |
Then still a purpose enclosing all, and over and beneath all, ever since what might be call’d thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance to justify the ways of God to man... which is the foundation of moral America... to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each. While I can not understand it or argue it out, I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism through Time.
Acceptance | Beauty | Belief | Character | Desire | Existence | Faith | God | Health | Justify | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Mystery | Nature | Object | Purpose | Purpose | Thought | Time | Wisdom | Beauty | God | Poem | Thought | Understand |
To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of eternal things; to knowledge, the rational knowledge of temporal things.
This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false--yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.
Books | Character | Comfort | Destiny | Dignity | Ideas | Man | Mockery | Peace | Wisdom | Words | Work |
There seem to be some persons, the favorites of fortune and darlings of nature, who are born cheerful. “A star danced” at their birth. It is no superficial visibility, but a bountiful and beneficent soul that sparkles in their eyes and smiles on their lips. Their inborn geniality amounts to genius, the rare and difficult genius which creates sweet and wholesome character, and radiates cheer.
Birth | Character | Fortune | Geniality | Genius | Nature | Soul |
We can accomplish almost anything within our ability if we but think we can! Every great achievement in this world was first carefully thought out... Think - but to a purpose. Think constructively. Think as you read. Think as you listen. Think as you travel and eyes reveal new situations. Think as you work daily at your place in life. There can be no advancement or success without serious thought.
Ability | Achievement | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Success | Thought | Wisdom | Work | World | Think | Thought |
A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it.
Comfort | Common Sense | Estimation | Genius | Mankind | Peace | People | Rank | Reason | Science | Sense | Time | Will | Wisdom | Happiness |
When performing a good deed and other people are present, imagine you are standing in a forest surrounded only by trees and flowers. In the long run there is no difference between the two situations. Just as the trees have no awareness of what you are doing, so too in the long run it does not make a difference what those people thought about you for the few seconds they saw you.
Awareness | Character | Good | People | Present | Thought | Awareness | Thought |
Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail.
Character | Experience | Wisdom | Words |
Intellectual and spiritual leaders hailed the cause of civil rights and gave little thought to where the civil disobedience road might end. But defiance of the law, even for the best reasons, opens a tiny hole in the dike and soon a trickle becomes a flood... And while no thinking person denies that social injustice exits, no thinking person can condone any group, for any reason, taking justice into his own hands. Once this is permitted, democracy dies; for democracy is sustained through one great premise: the premise that civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities.
Cause | Civil disobedience | Defiance | Democracy | Disobedience | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Law | Little | Reason | Rights | Thinking | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |