This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Always try to do something for the other fellow and you will be agreeably surprised how things come your way - how many pleasing things are done for you.
We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body, and the over work of the brain. In this railway age the wear and tear of labor and intellect go on without pause or self-pity. We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more, from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles; we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.
Age | Body | Labor | Neglect | Pity | Self | Strength | Wisdom | Work | Intellect |
Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
Keep the middle path of strength and virtue, lest you be overwhelmed by misfortune or corrupted by pleasant fortune. All that falls short or goes too far ahead, has contempt for happiness, and gains not the reward for labor done. It rests in your own hands what shall be the nature of the fortune which you choose to form for yourself. For all fortune which seems difficult, either exercises virtue, or corrects or punishes vice.
Contempt | Fortune | Labor | Misfortune | Nature | Reward | Strength | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Misfortune |
What is Zen in the art of helping? It is easier to say what it is not than more positively to describe the essence. It is to avoid the boosting of the ego through ‘good works’. It is to aid oneself and others in the pursuit of the good life; to discover and uncover new vigour and freshness in the art of living; to uncover the primal ability of love. Living in the here and now is a major ingredient.
Ability | Aid | Art | Ego | Good | Life | Life | Love | Wisdom | Zen | Art |
The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism!
We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. In the assurance of strength there is strength; and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers.
Cause | Distrust | Faith | Life | Life | Self | Strength | Unhappiness | Wisdom |
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
Benevolence | Fraud | Good | Knowledge | Little | Mankind | Wisdom | World | Friendship | Forgive | Learn |
An accession of wealth is a dangerous predicament for a man. At first he is stunned, if the accession be sudden; he is very humble and very grateful. Then he begins to speak a little louder; people think him more sensible, and soon he thinks himself so.
The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm.
Dignity | Discovery | Duty | Experience | God | Humility | Liberty | Life | Life | Obligation | Repentance | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Teach | Truth | Will | Wisdom | God |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one is miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and commend it in their precepts.
Adversity | Happy | Prosperity | Wisdom |