This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Worldly riches are like nuts; many clothes are torn in getting them, many a tooth broke in cracking them, but never a belly filled with eating them.
Enemies are wealth to anyone who can derive profit from them.
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time.
Experience | People | Time | Wisdom | Trouble |
When a person focuses on the goals of his life, he is able to overcome the difficulties involved. When one’s focus is on olam haboh [world-to-come], he lives in a state of happiness even though he experiences many inconveniences along his relatively short trip.
Character | Focus | Goals | Life | Life | World | Happiness |
Awareness of the inevitability of death need not cause sadness. Rather we can use it to destroy the common worries about inconsequential aspects of life. Many worries are over matters that have no lasting value. When you overcome worry, your mind will be free to think of your ultimate goals in life.
Awareness | Cause | Character | Death | Destroy | Goals | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Sadness | Will | Worry | Think |
I have known many troubles, but most of them never happened.
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
People with many interests live, not only longest, but happiest. People with interests are never bores!
Many have fallen by the edge of the sword, but not as many as have fallen by the tongue.
Wisdom |
There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it. This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should debase and lowliness exalt. But pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us. But pride, being a defect of nature, by the very act of refusing subjection and revolution from Him who is supreme, falls to a low condition.
Enough | God | Heart | Humility | Nature | Nothing | Pious | Pride | Revolution | Wisdom |
He never taught any law or practice contrary to the Written Law. Only after his death... many of his disciples introduced practices and doctrines altogether foreign to him, removing thereby the cornerstone of the Law while winning the multitudes.
The major fact about history is that in large part it appears criminal.
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
Character | Civilization | Ideas |
In our thinking we must preserve an open and enquiring mind, an ability to see things through the eyes of our opponents, a skill for understanding the motives and thoughts of those whom we oppose. Yet we must act in the light of the best knowledge and reason available to us at the moment.
Ability | Character | Knowledge | Light | Mind | Motives | Reason | Skill | Thinking | Understanding | Wisdom |