This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé
Dreams have as much influence as actions.
The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
Good | Indispensable | Opposition | Reason | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against and not with the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm. Let no man wax pale, therefore, because of opposition.
Better | Man | Opposition | Wisdom |
Peace is a value which man has always sought: Peace among the nations, peace among men, but most of all peace of mind. While man has sought peace external to himself, he may have overlooked the fact that the peace that will influence all living things will be the peace that is first discovered within himself.
Influence | Man | Men | Mind | Nations | Peace | Will | Wisdom | Value |
Robert South, fully Bishop Robert South
Temperance is a virtue which casts the truest lustre upon the person it is lodged in, and has the most general influence upon all other particular virtues of any that the soul of man is capable of; indeed so general, that there is hardly any noble quality or endowment of the mind, but must own temperance either for its parent or its nurse; it is the greatest strengthener and clearer of reason, and the best preparer of it for religion, the sister of prudence, and the handmaid to devotion.
Devotion | Influence | Man | Mind | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Religion | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Parent |
The history of Christendom would have been far happier if we all had remembered one rule of intelligence - not to believe a thing more strongly at the end of a bitter argument than at the beginning, not to believe it with the energy of the opposition rather than one's own.
Argument | Beginning | Energy | History | Intelligence | Opposition | Rule | Wisdom |
Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach
In this world within, your world, you are the most important figure. There is a place that no one else can fill There is an influence that no one else can impart. There is a life that no one else can live quite as well as you can live it. What you do with your life within, in terms of self-realization, self-awareness, self-denial and self-expression, is the greatest challenge that can come to you.
Awareness | Challenge | Important | Influence | Life | Life | Self | Self-awareness | Self-denial | Self-realization | World |
Ashoka or Ashoka the Great NULL
One should honour another man’s sect, for by doing so one increases the influence of one’s own sect and benefits that of the other man.
There is a dialectical relation between one’s life and one’s work. The former obviously influences the latter, but one’s work also becomes an influence on one’s life. It is atwo way affair, a mysterious process where what we call life and what we call creation merge, and do not merge, cross feed each other.
One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.
The most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.
Competition | Culture | Destroy | Nature | Opposition | Self | Wrong |
Materialism assumes a line of `continuity’ running through the whole scheme of nature, despite its obvious gaps; on the contrary, he underlines the significance of `discontinuity’ as positive evidence of the intervention of a higher source of influence which escapes man’s limited `scale of observation.’ A giant or a microbe would, with similar intelligence, observe the same phenomenon differently; they might be guided by their scales of observation to different, or at least, to modified conclusions. There is no scientific truth in an absolute sense. The phrase Ad veritatem per scientiam is an absurdity.
Absolute | Evidence | Influence | Intelligence | Man | Materialism | Nature | Observation | Sense | Truth |
The great moral reformers have usually found the greatest opposition not in the “immoral” and impulsive individual, but in the regularly constituted organs of social authority and law.
Authority | Individual | Law | Opposition |