This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The evil are ever prone to detect the faults of others, though they be as small as mustard seeds, and persistently shut their eyes against their own, though they be as large as Vilva fruit.
Evil |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
Business | Comfort | Life | Life | Thought | Business | Thought |
In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are.
Men |
I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.
George Sand, pen name for Amandine Lucte Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant
Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
Excitement | Life | Life |
There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature.
Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron
A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything
All the civilization we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.
Civilization | People | Power |
Harold Kushner, fully Harold Samuel Kushner
We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough.
A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties.
The scrutiny of human nature on a small scale is one of the most dangerous of employments; the study of it on a large scale is one of the safest and truest.
Human nature | Nature | Study |
What we hope for at the School of Dreams is the strength both to deal and to receive the axe's blow, to look straight at the face of God, which is none other than my own face, but seen naked, the face of my soul. The face of "God" is the unveiling, the staggering vision fo the construction we are, the tiny and great lies, the small nontruths we must have incessantly woven to be able to prepare our brothers' dinner and cook for our children. An unveiling that only happens by surprise, by accident, and with a brutality that shatters: under the blow of truth, the eggshell we are breaks. Right in the middle of life's path: the apocalypse; we lose a life.
Brutality | Dreams | Hope | Receive | Right | Strength | Vision |
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Capacity | Energy | Future | History | People | Will | World | Think |
Saint Isaac of Nineveh, also Isaac the Syrian, Isaac of Qatar and Isaac Syrus NULL
There is no sin which cannot be pardoned except that one which lacks repentance, and there is no gift which is not augmented save that which remains without acknowledgement. For the portion of the fool is small in his eyes.
Sin |
Friendship is an arrangement by which we undertake to exchange small favors for big ones.