This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Is not beauty created at every encounter between a man and life, in which he repays his debt by focusing on the living moment all the power which life has given him as an obligation? Beauty - for the one who pays his debt. For others, too, perhaps.
Beauty | Debt | Life | Life | Man | Obligation | Power | Beauty |
Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man’s head.
He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the companionship which has been forever closed, feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to give one instant’s pleasure to the measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart which can only be discharged to the dust.
Debt | Future | Grave | Heart | Love | Pleasure | Sorrow | Spirit | Unkindness | Will | Companionship |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
Each of us has a responsibility for being alive: one responsibility to creation, of which we are a part, another to the creator - a debt we repay by trying to extend our areas of comprehension.
Debt | Responsibility |
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Debt | Imagination | Science |
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in his duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? The debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature?
Beauty | Debt | Duty | Folly | Genius | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Man | Mankind | Money | Nature | Thought | Wisdom | Beauty | Thought |
We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim.
Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.
Care | Circumstances | Debt | Sorrow | World |
Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.
Debt | Faith | Nature | Property | Public | Sacred | Title |
A duty dodged is like a debt unpaid; it is only deferred, and we must come back and settle the account at last.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Worrying about something is like paying interest on a debt you don't even know if you owe.
Debt |
One sacrifice, however great, is insufficient to pay the debt of sin. The atonement requires constant self-immolation on the sinner’s part. That God’s wrath should be vented upon His beloved Son, is divinely unnatural. Such a theory is man-made.
Debt |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it.
Debt | Freedom | Individual | Present | Receive | Society | Society | Vice |