This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
There never was a person who did anything worth doing that did not receive more than he gave.
Victories that are cheap are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.
There never was a person who do anything worth doing that did not receive more than he gave.
The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.
Conscience | Nothing | Worth |
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expended from it.
The moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect. For all these effects - agreeableness of one’s condition and even the promotion of the happiness of others - could have been also brought about by other causes, so that for this there would have been no need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this alone that the supreme and unconditional good can be found. The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
Action | Good | Law | Need | Nothing | Present | Will | Worth | Happiness |
Nine times out of ten, the best that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my acquaintance I never knew a man to be drowned who was worth saving.
Acquaintance | Man | Worth |
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
Worth |
An acre of performance is worth the whole world of promise.
A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory [Allegory: a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another, a symbolic narrative].