This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our whole life should speak forth our thankfulness; every condition and place we are in should be a witness to our thankfulness. This will make the times and places we live in better for us. When we ourselves are monuments of God’s mercy, it is fit we should be patterns of His praises, and leave monuments to others. We should think it given to us to do something better than to live in. We live not to live: our life is not the end of itself, but the praise of the giver.
Better | Character | God | Life | Life | Mercy | Praise | Thankfulness | Will | Witness | Think |
It would truly be a fine thing if men suffered themselves to be guided by reason, that they should acquiesce in the true remonstrances addressed to them by the writings of the learned and the advice of friends. But the greater part are so disposed that the words which enter by one ear do incontinently go out of the other, and begin again by following the custom. The best teacher one can have is necessity.
Advice | Character | Men | Necessity | Words | Following | Teacher |
Never stop seeking to increase the number of friends you have. Conversely, even one enemy is too many.
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
Each successive generation plunges into the abyss of passion, without the slightest regard to the fatal effects which such conduct has produced upon their predecessors; and lament, when too late, the rashness with which they slighted the advice of experience, and stifled the voice of reason.
Advice | Character | Conduct | Experience | Passion | Rashness | Reason | Regard |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.
Character | Courage | Death | Fortune | Grace | Mind | Peril | Quiet | Strength | Friends |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.