This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him.
Character | Consciousness | Existence | Judgment | Man | Opinion | Receive |
Roy L. Smith, aka Mr. Methodist
As a man grows older, he values the voice of experience more and the voice of prophecy less. He finds more of life's wealth in the common pleasures - home, health, children. He thinks more about worth of men and less about their wealth. He boasts less and boosts more. He hurries less, and usually makes more progress. He esteems the friendship of God a little higher.
Character | Children | Experience | God | Health | Life | Life | Little | Man | Men | Progress | Prophecy | Wealth | Worth | Friendship | God |
That charity alone endures which flows from a sense of duty and a hope in God. this is the charity that treads in secret those paths of misery from which all but the lowest of human wretches have fled; this is that charity which no labor can weary, no ingratitude detach, no horror disgust; that toils, that pardons, that suffers; that is seen by no man, and honored by no man, but, like the great laws of Nature, does the work of God in silence, and looks to a future and better world for its reward.
Better | Character | Charity | Duty | Future | God | Hope | Ingratitude | Labor | Looks | Man | Nature | Reward | Sense | Silence | Work | World | God |
Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
What the inner voice says will not disappoint the hoping soul.
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot or Pirqe Aboth) NULL
Who is wise? The man who can learn something from every man. Who is strong? The man who overcomes his passion. Who is rich? The man who is content with his fate. Whom do men honor? The man who honors his fellow man.
Character | Fate | Honor | Man | Men | Passion | Wise | Learn |
Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is a man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.
Character | Civilization | Consciousness | Inhumanity | Man | Object | Question | Time |
It is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life... The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind.
Art | Books | Character | Duty | Enjoyment | Glory | Life | Life | Mankind | Men | Order | Rest | Service | Talent |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned three things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind. Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful and miraculous treasure in the world. Fulfillment of duty is another beautiful thing, making life happy and giving to the soul an unconquerable force to sustain ideals. This is my second conviction, and my third is that cruelty, hatred, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral or material millennium.
Character | Convictions | Cruelty | Duty | Force | Fulfillment | Future | Giving | Happy | Heart | Ideals | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Mind | Soul | Will | World |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
There is one person whom it is my duty to make good and that is myself.
A moral decision is the loneliest thing that exists. Knowledge is shed abroad everywhere. Anybody may dip his cup into that great sea and take out what he can. It is a public appropriation from a public store. But what the man himself must do as a moral being, what ordering he shall make of his life, what allegiance he shall choose, what cause he shall cleave to - this is decided in that solitude where his soul in authentic presence lives with no other companion than the Final Authority which he recognizes as supreme.
Authority | Cause | Character | Decision | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Public | Solitude | Soul |
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience, and stifled the voice of reason.
Advice | Character | Conduct | Experience | Passion | Rashness | Reason | Regard |