This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality and aimed at goodness more than greatness.
Character | Greatness | Knowledge | Man | Morality | Practice | Time | Wisdom |
Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.
Character | Leisure | Men | Temptation | Time |
Waste of time is the most extravagant and costly of all expenses.
While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision.
Action | Better | Consideration | Courage | Decision | Experience | Failure | Fear | Habit | Judgment | Man | Mind | Nothing | Position | Question | Responsibility | Right | Time | Will | Wisdom | Failure |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
He that has a "spirit of detail" will do better in life than many who figured beyond him in the university. Such an one is minute and particular. He adjusts trifles; and these trifles compose most of the business and happiness of life. Great events happen seldom, and affect few; trifles happen every moment to everybody; and though one occurrence of them adds little to the happiness or misery of life, yet the sum total of their continual repetition is of the highest consequence.
Better | Business | Character | Events | Life | Life | Little | Spirit | Trifles | Will | Business | Happiness |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Grand is the seen, the light, to me - grand are the sky and stars, grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, but grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, lighting the slight, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (what were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far - more lasting thou than they.