This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.
If any young man expects without faith, without thought, without study, without patient, persevering labor, in the midst of and in spite of discouragement, to attain anything in this world tht is worth attaining, he will simply wake up, by-and-by, and find that he has been playing the part of a fool.
Character | Faith | Labor | Man | Study | Thought | Will | World | Worth |
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith
Freedom is a dreadful thing unless it goes hand in hand with responsibility. Democracy among men is a specter except when the hearts of men are mature.
Character | Democracy | Freedom | Men | Responsibility |
We bury love; forgetfulness grows over it like grass; that is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
Character | Forgetfulness | Love |
Henry Suso, aka Amandus or Saint Henry Suso
All creatures have existed eternally in the divine essence, as in their exemplar. So far as they conform to the divine idea, all beings were, before their creation, one thing with the essence of God. (God creates into time what was and is in eternity.” Eternally, all creatures are God in God... So far as they are in God, they are the same life, the same essence, the same power, the same One, and nothing less.
Character | Eternity | God | Life | Life | Nothing | Power | Time | God |
Never teach false modesty. How exquisitely absurd to teach a girl that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet: if she has five grains of common sense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their proper value.
Absurd | Beauty | Character | Common Sense | Life | Life | Modesty | Sense | Teach | Will | Beauty | Happiness |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
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 |