This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem and turned it into an opportunity.
Opportunity | People | Success |
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.
In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
Allan Bloom, fully Allan David Bloom
Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disappeared. Leisure (has become) entertainment.
Capacity | Entertainment | Leisure | Life | Life | Men | Taste |
“Ends” are mere appearances, landmarks strewn haphazard along a path whose issue is hidden from you.
Ends |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.
The wisdom of God says, “I alone can make you understand who you are.” God has willed to make Himself quite recognizable to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.
Desire | Enough | God | Heart | Light | Obscurity | Obscurity | Wisdom | God | Understand |
In most quarrels there is fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint as well as steel. Either of them may hammer on wood forever; no fire will follow.
The teacher must step back and review each day as a student, always feeling that there is more and more to learn, love appreciate. -- Be in this world, but not of it... Everything comes back on the Universal clock of time... everything. Memorize the aphorism that irrelevancy of circumstance is the highest wisdom of life... Your 'balance' is your ammunition; one should not fire it, but rather maintain it.
Aphorism | Balance | Day | Life | Life | Love | Time | Wisdom | World | Circumstance | Teacher |
Dionysius of Halicarnassus NULL
The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of transcendent beauty.
Absolute | Beauty | Darkness | Obscurity | Obscurity | Silence | Truth |
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the small and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulation of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure.
Elegance | Force | Life | Life | Pleasure | Regulation | Taste | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities, and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intemperate diet.