This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure.
Marguerite Yourcenar, pseudonym for Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the Gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.
Books | Confidence | Faith | Future | Indifference | Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Men | Order | Peace | Time | Will | Work | World | Think |
Marie Curie, fully Marie Skłodowska-Curie, originally Manya Sklodowska
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
Mary Kay Ash, fully Mary Kathlyn Wagner Ash
Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.
Ability | Confidence |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
As the peculiar faculty of the eye is to see form and colour, and of the ear to hear sweet tones and voices, so is aspiration peculiar to the soul. To relax from ceaseless aspiration is sin. This energy of aspiration directed to and grasping God, as far as is possible for the creature, is called Hope, which is also a divine virtue. Through this faculty the soul acquires such great confidence that she deems nothing in the Divine Nature beyond her reach.
Aspiration | Confidence | Energy | Nature | Nothing | Soul | Aspiration |
I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it — and I therefore hope and am fully persuaded that you are working. Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiassed on our minds. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge.
Absolute | Confidence | Critic | Error | Experiment | Friend | Good | Hope | Humility | Man | Nature | Nothing | Reward | Science |
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who cometh sound out of the school of severity and restraint.
Confidence | Safe | Sound |
Daily routine is a strategy which most settings have in use to empower children. The daily routine “provides a consistent, predictable sequence of events that gives children a sense of control over what happens in their day” . Different settings develop different routine depend how long children stay in the premises and their age, but most of the daily routine contain basic components such as: outside routine, large group time, small group time, register time, art/craft time, tidy up time and snack/meal time. During the daily routine the child learns to make choices and discovers their consequences. This creates sort of secure environment, because children know what to expect and this allows them to be more involve in the tasks and more co-operative with the practitioner. The second strategy is planning and providing different activities and experiences for children. This strategy is suggested by the EYFS because allows for adventure, exploration and gaining new experiences. Different activities, which the setting provide develop range of skills and abilities. Taking part in activities, free-flow or structured, allows children learn social interactions and behaviours such as sharing equipment, taking turns. Providing activities allows children to use their language to communicate wiliness to participation in it, raising their confidence to communicate and self reliance to complete it. Providing different activities stimulate children`s imagination, cognitive, language, personal, social and emotional as well as physical development and allow to fulfil children`s potential.
Children | Confidence | Control | Events | Language | Self | Sense | Time | Child | Learn |
Close friends and relatives, while not meaning to do so, often handicap one through "opinions" and sometimes through ridicule, which is meant to be humorous. Thousands of men and women carry inferiority complexes with them all through life, because some well-meaning but ignorant person destroyed their confidence through "opinions" or ridicule.
Confidence | Inferiority | Meaning | Men | Friends |
If we do have realistic confidence ... if we feel secure within ourselves, we tend to experience the world as open to us and to respond appropriately to challenges and opportunities. Self-esteem empowers, ennergizes, motivates. It inspires us to achieve and allows us to take pleasure and pride in our achievements.
Confidence | Experience | Pleasure | Pride | Self-esteem | World |
Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life, and as being worthy of happiness. Thus, it consists of two components: (1) self-efficacy — confidence in one’s ability to think, learn, choose, and make appropriate decisions; and (2) self-respect — confidence that love, friendship, achievement, success — in a word, happiness — are natural and appropriate.
Ability | Confidence | Experience | Success | Happiness |
Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.
Confidence | Conscience | Despise | Evolution | Ideas | Important | Law | Position | Science | Will |
It is easy to lose confidence in our natural ability to raise children. The true techniques for raising children are simple: Be with them, play with them, talk to them. You are not squandering their time no matter what the latest child development books say about "purposeful play" and "cognitive learning skills."
Ability | Books | Children | Confidence | Learning | Play | Time | Child |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
Belief | Confidence | Deeds | Life | Life | Nobility | Reality | Soul | Will | Deeds |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Success in politics demands that you must take your people into confidence about your views and state them very clearly, very politely, very calmly, but nevertheless, state them openly.
Confidence | People | Politics |
The inherent unpredictability of future scientific developments—the fact that no secure inference can be drawn from one state of science to another—has important implications for the issue of the limits of science. It means that present-day science cannot speak for future science: it is in principle impossible to make any secure inferences from the substance of science at one time about its substance at a significantly different time. The prospect of future scientific revolutions can never be precluded. We cannot say with unblinking confidence what sorts of resources and conceptions the science of the future will or will not use. Given that it is effectively impossible to predict the details of what future science will accomplish, it is no less impossible to predict in detail what future science will not accomplish. We can never confidently put this or that range of issues outside 'the limits of science', because we cannot discern the shape and substance of future science with sufficient clarity to be able to say with any assurance what it can and cannot do. Any attempt to set 'limits' to science—any advance specification of what science can and cannot do by way of handling problems and solving questions—is destined to come to grief.
Confidence | Future | Important | Means | Problems | Science | Time | Will |
The distance at which it can strike, and the destructive power of such a quasi-intelligent machine being for all practical purposes unlimited, the gun, the armor of the battleship and the wall of the fortress, lose their import and significance. One can prophesy with a Daniel's confidence that skilled electricians will settle the battles of the near future. But this is the least. In its effect upon war and peace, electricity offers still much greater and more wonderful possibilities. To stop war by the perfection of engines of destruction alone, might consume centuries and centuries. Other means must be employed to hasten the end.
Confidence | Means | Perfection | Power | War | Will |
The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other... Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.
Ability | Cause | Confidence | Contradiction | Desire | Generosity | History | Indispensable | Justify | Order | People | Risk | Struggle | Trust |
Pema Chödrön, born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown
Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. From an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It's covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.
Confidence | Ego | Experience | Joy | Mind | Qualities |
You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights.
Confidence | Feelings | Individual | Love | Mankind | Power | Property | Will |