This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another, and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
Prayer is not only worship; it is also an invisible emanation of man’s worshipping spirit - the most powerful form of energy that one can generate. The influence of prayer on the human mind and body is as demonstrable as that of secreting glands. It results can be measured in terms of increased physical buoyancy, greater intellectual vigor, moral stamina, and a deeper understanding of the realities underlying human relationships. If you make a habit of sincere prayer, your life will be very noticeably and profoundly altered.
Body | Energy | Habit | Influence | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Prayer | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Worship |
Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
A brilliant achievement may win for you the favor of a people at one stroke; but to earn the love and respect of the population that surrounds you, a long succession of little services rendered and of obscure good deeds, a constant habit of kindness and an established reputation for disinterestedness will be required.
Achievement | Deeds | Good | Habit | Kindness | Little | Love | People | Reputation | Respect | Will | Respect |
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. And if the habit of prayer is seen to be so important for teaching a man to love his fellow men, this is because no answer is given to his prayers. Your love is based on hatred when you wrap yourself up in a certain man or woman on whom you batten as a stock of food laid by and, like dogs snarling at teach other round their trough, you fall to hating anyone who casts even a glance at your repast. you call it love, this selfish appetite. No sooner is love bestowed on you than (even as in your false friendships) you convert this free gift into servitude and bondage and, from the very moment you are loved, you begin to fancy yourself wronged.
Appetite | Habit | Important | Love | Man | Men | Nothing | Prayer | Servitude | Teach | Woman |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.
Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.
Birth | Experience | Growth | Habit | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.
Anger | Change | Character | Courage | Experience | Feelings | Gentleness | Good | Habit | Listening | Melody | Men | Music | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Power | Qualities | Right | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue |
Our eyes see only by permission of the mind... Truly our minds can be barriers, not because of the knowledge they acquire, but because of the intellectual habit of interpreting the unknown in terms of the known. The spiritual transcendent and the mind not only suffers defeat in trying to interpret it, but also blocks reception of the formless Real
No consenting soul can be made to sin, and so sin is inexcusable.
It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience. We cannot dodge this challenge without renouncing our highest moral pretentions.
Challenge | Conscience | Pride | Sin |
Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.
Eternity | Existence | Force | Habit | Imagination | Nothing | Power | Present | Reason | Reflection | Thinking |
True repentance consists in the heart being broken for sin and broken from sin. Some often repent, yet never reform; they resemble a man traveling in a dangerous path, who frequently starts and stops, but never turns back.
Heart | Man | Reform | Repentance | Sin |
The slightest sorrow for sin is sufficient if it produce amendment, and the greatest insufficient if it do not.