This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Of all parts of wisdom, the practice is the best. Socrates was esteemed the wisest man of his time because he turned his acquired knowledge into morality and aimed at goodness more than greatness.
Character | Greatness | Knowledge | Man | Morality | Practice | Time | Wisdom |
We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.
Ambition | Distinguish | Prosperity | Wisdom | Ambition | Happiness |
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
It is from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
If anyone should ask me what was the motive for the creation of the world, I will answer what Moses taught, that it was the goodness of the Existent.
Whatever of goodness emanates from the soul, gathers its soft halo in the eyes; an if the heart be a lurking-place of crime, the eyes are sure to betray the secret. A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction assent, an enraged eye makes beauty a deformity; so you see, forsooth, the little organ plays no inconsiderable, if not a dominant, part.
Beauty | Contradiction | Crime | Heart | Little | Silence | Soul | Wisdom | Beauty |
Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life - it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever, but a conscience void of offense before God and man is an inheritance for eternity.
Conscience | Eternity | God | Inheritance | Life | Life | Man | Offense | Reputation | Wisdom | World | God |
The weight of great power crushes the goodness of the man who rules and the honesty of those who are ruled.
At last religion has come to reckon with the fact that its highest quest is not for a supernatural order but just for natural goodness in the largest and fullest measure.
Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
The dignity of man and the dignity of faith require the recognition of freedom to choose the truth, and freedom in the truth. Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom and not goodness.
Dignity | Faith | Freedom | Man | Nature | Perfection | Truth |
Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
The moral goodness of man, the necessary consequence of his constitution, is capable of indefinite perfection like all his other faculties, and nature has linked together in an unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue.
Man | Nature | Perfection | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Human existence has no such simple and direct meaning or goodness as the humanistic American dream... A comfortable chair, a hi-fi set, a pwoerful car, the protection of a deoderant, a college romance and a paying job, cannot even in combination provide meaning for our life.
F. A. Hayek, fully Friedrich August Hayek or von Hayek
Outside the sphere of individual responsibility there is neither goodness or badness… Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them has our decision moral value.
Decision | Individual | Responsibility | Sacrifice |