This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
Character | Danger | Imagination | Intelligence | Kindness | Love | Will | Danger |
Harry Golden, born Herschel Goldhirsch
A human being can go without food longer than he can go without human dignity.
W. T. Grant, fully William Thomas Grant
It must be obvious to those who take the time to look at human life that its greatest values lie not in getting things, but in doing them, in doing them together, in all working toward a common aim, in the experience of comradeship, of warmhearted 100% human life.
Character | Experience | Life | Life | Time |
What our deepest self craves is not mere enjoyment, but some supreme purpose that will enlist all our powers and will give unity and direction to our life. We can never know the profoundest joy without a conviction that our life is significant - not a meaningless episode. The loftiest aim of human life is the ethical perfecting of mankind - the transfiguration of humanity.
Character | Enjoyment | Humanity | Joy | Life | Life | Mankind | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Unity | Will |
For... what liberty is; there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he useth in his mind, that is, what he himself meaneth when he saith an action... is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be satisfied... that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external impediments. But to those that out of custom speak not what they conceive, but what they heard, and are not able, or will not take the pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument can be sufficient, because experience and matter of fact are not verified by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory.
Absence | Action | Argument | Character | Custom | Experience | Liberty | Man | Memory | Men | Mind | Reflection | Sense | Will | Words | Think |
When the Golden Rule becomes the law of human life all this will be changed. The employer will ask how much he can pay the worker, not how little. The workman will ask how much he can do, not how little. We may not be able to reach this condition, but the war can be restricted and its evils ameliorated.
Character | Golden Rule | Law | Life | Life | Little | Rule | War | Will | Golden Rule |
War some day will be abolished by the will of man. This assertion does not in any way invalidate the truth that war is fundamentally caused by impersonal, political, economic and social forces. But it is the destiny of man to master and control such force, even as it is his destiny to harness rivers, chain the lightning and ride the storm. It is human will, operating under social forces, that has abolished slavery, infanticide, dueling, and a score of other social enormities. Why should it not do the same for war?
Assertion | Character | Control | Day | Destiny | Force | Man | Slavery | Truth | War | Will | Wisdom |
Conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minute’s’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not differ sensibly from a straight line.
Character | Conversation | Enough | Little | People | Intellect |
Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare
The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.
Business | Character | Human nature | Nature | Philosophy | Business |
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
Character | Human nature | Kindness | Nature |
The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.
Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.
Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |
The human species... capacity for good is infinite, since they can, they desire, make room within themselves for divine Reality. But at the same time their capacity for evil is, not indeed infinite (since evil is always ultimately self-destructive and therefore temporary), but uniquely great. Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation... To be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton’s Satan, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except only charity and wisdom.
Capacity | Character | Charity | Desire | Devil | Evil | God | Good | Hell | Reality | Satan | Self | Time | Will | Wisdom |
Immortality is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground: survival is persistence in one of the forms of time. Immortality is the result of total deliverance.
Character | Eternal | Immortality | Persistence | Survival | Time |