This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.
The habit of dissipating every serious thought by a succession of agreeable sensations is as fatal to happiness as to virtue; for when amusement is uniformly substituted for objects of moral and mental interest, we lose all that elevates our enjoyments above the scale of childish pleasures.
Character | Habit | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness | Thought |
The fact is that we can find happiness only in serving others. Just as a car is designed to move, so is a man designed to serve. And if he looks for happiness in anything other than service and sacrifice, he will always be disappointed.
Character | Looks | Man | Sacrifice | Service | Will | Happiness |
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Belief | Character | Chastity | Lying | Man | Infidelity | Happiness |
God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers.
Better | Character | Evil | God | Temptation | Wisdom | Temptation |
For most or even all forms of evil serve the Universe - much as the poisonous snake has it use - though in most cases their function is unknown. Vice itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security.
It is a mistake to base one’s hopes for happiness upon the enforcement of security and equality. In principle, both desires are insatiable... No individual or society is secure in a world of emergent probability and sin... To exercise liberty is to take risks, to embrace uncertainties.
Character | Equality | Individual | Liberty | Mistake | Security | Sin | Society | World | Society | Happiness |
Tai-shang Kan-Ying Pien (Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution) NULL
The recompense of good and evil follows as the shadow follows the figure.
Character | Evil | Good | Recompense |
To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the Soul; for the Soul’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness.
Action | Character | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Happiness |
Even when there is no law, there is conscience... An evil conscience is often quiet, but never secure.
Character | Conscience | Evil | Law | Quiet |