This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
My parents never bound us to any church but taught us that the love of goodness was the love of God, the cheerful doing of duty made life happy, and that the love of one’s neighbor in its widest sense was the best help for oneself. Their lives showed us how lovely this simple faith was, how much honor, gratitude and affection it brought them, and what a sweet memory they left behind.
Church | Duty | Faith | God | Gratitude | Happy | Honor | Life | Life | Love | Memory | Parents | Sense |
People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children.
Aims | Children | Day | Earth | Father | God | Happy | Little | Purpose | Purpose | Race | Soul |
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and for this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.
Cause | Circumstances | Day | Experiment | Father | Luck | Man | Men | Time | Luck |
Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
Beware of covetousness, which is a malady, diseaseful, incurable. Intimacy with it is impossible, it makes the sweet friend bitter, it alienates the trusted one from his master, it makes father and mother mad… it divorces a man’s wife.
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."
The greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced... why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world?
A child tells in the street what its father and mother say at home.
Though “the words of the wise be as nails fastened by the masters of the assemblies,” yet sure their examples are the hammer to drive them in to take the deeper hold. A father that whipped his son for swearing, and, swore himself whist he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction.
Though "the words of the wise be as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies," yet their examples are the hammer to drive them in to take the deeper hold. A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore himself whilst he whipped him, did more harm by his example than the good by his correction.
Society - the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world’s university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.
Ambition | Character | Church | Equality | Government | Ideas | Merit | Opinion | Power | Public | Sense | Society | World | Government |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
In democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. Most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most efficient means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor without feeling the same necessities; say, rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world.
Attention | Desire | Father | Fortune | Man | Means | Men | Respect | Success | Wealth | Will | World | Respect |
No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state.
It is my feeling that Time ripens all things; with Time all things are revealed; Time is the father of truth.