This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
And yet we are very apt to be full of ourselves, instead of Him that made what we so much value, and but for whom we can have no reason to value ourselves. For we have nothing that we can call our own, no, not ourselves; for we are all but tenants, and at will too, of the great Lord of ourselves, and the rest of this great farm, the world that we live upon.
Lord | Nothing | Reason | Rest | Will | Wisdom | World | Value |
The surest eventuality in life is death... You always have to do your best in whatever work comes your way. Only then can you express your gratitude for having been endowed with life. Only then can you rest assured of reaching paradise after death.
Death | Gratitude | Life | Life | Paradise | Rest | Wisdom | Work |
Joshua Reynolds, fully Sir Joshua Reynolds
We never are satisfied with our opinions, whatever we may pretend, till they are ratified and confirmed by the suffrages of the rest of mankind. We dispute and wrangle forever; we endeavor to get men to come to us, when we do not go to them.
Exercise, temperance, fresh air, and needful rest are the best of all physicians.
Every person thinks his own intellect perfect, and his own child handsome.
Wit gives to life one of its best flavors; common-sense leads to immediate action, and gives society its daily motion; large and comprehensive views, its annual rotation; ridicule chastises folly and imprudence, and keeps men in their proper sphere; subtlety seizes hold of the find threads of truth; analogy darts away in the most sublime discoveries; feeling paints all the exquisite passions of man’s soul, and rewards him by a thousand inward visitations for the sorrows that come from without.
Action | Folly | Life | Life | Man | Men | Ridicule | Sense | Society | Soul | Truth | Wisdom | Wit | Society |
It is by thought that has aroused my intellect from its slumbers, which has “given lustre to virtue, and dignity to truth,” or by those examples which have inflamed my soul with the love of goodness, and not by means of sculptured marble, that I hold communion with Shakespeare and Milton, with Johnson and Burke, with Howard and Wilberforce.
Dignity | Love | Means | Soul | Thought | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Intellect | Thought |
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.
Logic | Peace | Principles | Wisdom | Intellect |
Happy are those whose life is today and only today. Sad are the prophets and those others whose eyes are open to the past. Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays nor their tomorrows filled with despair: they rest in peace.
Despair | Happy | Life | Life | Past | Peace | Rest | Blessed |
Alain-Fournier, Pseudonym of Henri Alban-Fournier NULL
There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it's rather hard to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us.