This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most generous and merciful in judgment upon the faults of others, are always the most free from faults themselves.
Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum of the heart.
Character | Heart | Temptation |
The fire which seems extinguished often slumbers beneath the ashes.
Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according tot he predominancy of the element.
Character | Conscience | Destroy |
Paul Chatfield, pseudonym for Horace Smith
As friendship must be founded on mutual esteem, it cannot long exist among the vicious; for we soon find ill company to be like a dog, which dirts those the most whom he loves the best.
Character | Esteem | Friendship |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth.
There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness.
Admiration | Character | Forbearance | Forgiveness | Love | Men | Nothing | Pity |
You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.
A person’s soul has a spark of divinity. Forgetting one’s lofty identity, one might pick up major faults and bad habits. Therefore remember at all times that you are a child of the great King and it is not befitting to act in a lowly and degrading manner.
Madame Dufresnoy, fully Madame Frederique Anne Dufresnoy
Wrinkles of the face may be successfully hidden by art; not so with the wrinkles of the heart.
We have in America the largest public school system on earth, the most expensive college buildings, the most extensive curriculum, but nowhere else is education so blind to its objectives, so indifferent to any specific outcome as in America. One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues.
Character | Earth | Education | Objectives | Public | System | Trouble |
François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
Faults will turn to good, provided we use them to our own humiliation, without slackening in the effort to correct ourselves. Discouragement serves no possible purpose; it is simply the despair of wounded self-love. The real way of profiting by the humiliation of one’s own faults is to face them in their true hideousness, without ceasing to hope in God, while hoping nothing from self.
Character | Despair | Effort | God | Good | Hope | Love | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Self-love | Will |