This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
He is one of the noblest conquerors who carries on a successful warfare against his own appetites and passions, and has them under wise and full control.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
Character | Impartiality | Soul | Will |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus rise and increase.
Character | Important | Men | Morality | Success | Will | World |
Exaggerated respect for athletics, an excess of coarse impressions brought about by the technical discoveries of recent years, the increased severity of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of political life: all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic and superficial.
Age | Athletics | Character | Culture | Desire | Excess | Existence | Life | Life | Respect | Struggle | Respect |
Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
Character | Enemy | Force | Individual | Mankind | Opportunity | Power | Society | Terror | Society |
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
To make a man happy, fill his hands with work, his heart with affection, his mind with purpose, his memory with useful knowledge, his future with hope, and his stomach with food. The devil never enters a man except one of these rooms be vacant.
Character | Devil | Future | Happy | Heart | Hope | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | Work |
A person’s soul has a spark of divinity. Forgetting one’s lofty identity, one might pick up major faults and bad habits. Therefore remember at all times that you are a child of the great King and it is not befitting to act in a lowly and degrading manner.
Emil Fackenheim, fully Emil Ludwig Fackenheim
Man can never escape the ideal or absolute; he can merely exchange one absolute for another. He can ignore anything beyond his needs only by making an ideal out of the fulfillment of his needs themselves. In short, man cannot be an animal; he can only be a philosopher or anthropologist who asserts that men are animals and ought to live like them. It is not necessary to point out that this is just to set up another absolute.
Absolute | Character | Fulfillment | Man | Men |
In spiritual matters, every single person lives in an entirely different world. One person’s world in no way touches the world of any other person. Hence, there is no need to feel envious of the spiritual accomplishments of others.
Diogenes Laërtius, aka "Diogenes the Cynic"
To arrive at perfection, a man should have very sincere friends, or inveterate enemies; because he would be made sensible of his good or ill conduct either by the censures of the one or the admonitions of the others.
Character | Conduct | Good | Man | Perfection |
He is the wisest and happiest man who, by constant attention of thought discovers the greatest opportunity of doing good, and breaks through every opposition that he may improve these opportunities.
Attention | Character | Good | Man | Opportunity | Opposition | Thought | Thought |
J. L. M. Curry, fully Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry
A state to prosper, must be built on foundations of moral character, and, this character is the principal element of its strength, and the only guaranty of its permanence and prosperity.
Character | Prosperity | Strength |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character
What I am thinking and doing day by day is resistlessly shaping my future - a future in which there is no expiation except through my own better conduct. No one can save me. No one can live my life for me. If I am wise I shall begin today to build my own truer and better world from within.
Better | Character | Conduct | Day | Future | Life | Life | Thinking | Wise | World |
Ilya Ehrenburg, fully Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg
Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.