This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.
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.
If this life is unhappy, it is a burden to us, which it is difficult to bear; if it is in every respect happy, it is dreadful to be deprived of it; so that in either case the result is the same, for we must exist in anxiety and apprehension.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Happy | Life | Life | Respect | Wisdom | Respect |
We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living.
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!
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 |
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 |
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 |
Joy is indeed a precious quality which very few experience in their lives. The person who knows how to enjoy life will never grow old no matter how many years he can call his own. It is easy to be happy at specific times, but there is a certain art in being happy and contented every day.
Art | Day | Experience | Happy | Joy | Life | Life | Will | Wisdom | Art | Old |
Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton
Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the seven deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it be not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.
Body | Business | Cause | Devil | Idleness | Melancholy | Mind | Wisdom |