This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William Howells, fully William Dean Howells, aka The Dean of American Letters
The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
We [may] answer the question: Why is snow white? by saying, For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white—in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.
Action |
Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward.
If truth is a value it is because it is true and not because it is brave to speak it.
Action | Experience | Poetry | Thought | Thought |
Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
Authority | Civilization | Cruelty | Discipline | Doubt | Duty | Force | Little | Manliness | Men | Opinion | Public | Question | War | Work | Cruelty | Afraid |
The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man. They look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fashioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as something sickly and reprehensible rather than admirable; and a sanguine and 'muscular' attitude, which to our forefathers would have seemed purely heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of Christian character. I am not asking whether or not they are right, I am only pointing out the change.
The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower noes which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen, the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those temporary melting moods into which either the trials of real life, or the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially if we weep! For it is then as if our tears broke through an inveterate inner dam, and let all sorts of ancient peccancies and moral stagnancies drain away, leaving us now washed and soft of heart and open to every nobler leading. With most of us the customary hardness quickly returns, but not so with saintly persons. Many saints, even as energetic ones as Teresa and Loyola, have possessed what the church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the so-called gift of tears. In these persons the melting mood seems to have held almost uninterrupted control. And as it is with tears and melting moods, so it is with other exalted affections. Their reign may come by gradual growth or by a crisis; but in either case it may have come to stay.
Action | Faith | Man | Nature | Necessity | Present | Truth | Will |
Rejoice, lest pleasureless ye die. Within a little time must ye go by. Stretch forth your open hands, and while ye live take all the gifts that Death and Life may give!
Action |
Humility is often a false front we employ to gain power over others.
Action |
However great the advantages which nature bestows on us, it is not she alone, but fortune in conjunction with her, which makes heroes.
Nothing routs us but the villainy of our fears.
Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.
Action |
Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki
It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.
Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban
If wives suppress not contempt for husbands, then it follows that such wives rebuke and scold their husbands. If husbands stop not short of anger, then they are certain to beat their wives. The correct relationship between husband and wife is based upon harmony and intimacy, and conjugal love is grounded in proper union. Should actual blows be dealt, how could matrimonial relationship be preserved? Should sharp words be spoken, how could conjugal love exist? If love and proper relationship both be destroyed, then husband and wife are divided.
Action | Discussion | Disrespect | Habit | Heart | Husband | Knowing | Language | Lust | Space | Wife | Will | Following |