This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
He alone is a man who can resist the genius of the age, the tone of fashion, with vigorous simplicity and modest courage.
Every person alive today derives much benefit from comforts and pleasures that in the past were not available. All of the latest inventions and findings of technology serve us to a remarkable degree. For all this we should be full of appreciation and gratitude.
Appreciation | Character | Gratitude | Past | Technology | Appreciation |
The only conclusive evidence of a man’s sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
Character | Evidence | Life | Life | Man | Money | Practice | Sincerity | Truth | Words |
It is not the truth which a man possesses, or believes he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forth to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not by the possession, by the search after truth that he enlarges his power, wherein alone consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes one content, indolent, proud.
Character | Effort | Man | Perfection | Power | Search | Truth | Worth |
It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices, have very few virtues.
Character | Experience |
Anyone who works on self-improvement will find faults. An honest look at ourselves will show we are not on as high a spiritual level as we thought. Do not be excessively upset about this for it is a universal experience and should not disturb your peace of mind to the degree it will prevent you from further growth.
Character | Experience | Growth | Improvement | Mind | Peace | Self | Self-improvement | Thought | Will |
Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas
The fundamental experience which objective experience itself presumes is the fundamental experience of the Other... Moral consciousness is not an experience of values, but access to exterior Being: exterior being par excellence is the Other.
Character | Consciousness | Excellence | Experience | Excellence |
Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstances, it would be nearer the mark to say man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance.
Character | Circumstances | Existence | Man |
Thomas Malthus, fully Thomas Robert Malthus
An ardent love and admiration of virtue seems to imply the existence of something opposite to it, and it seems highly probably that the same beauty of form and substance, the same perfection of character could not be generated without the impressions of disapprobation which arise from the spectacle of moral evil.
Admiration | Beauty | Character | Evil | Existence | Love | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty |
He who sedulously attends, pointedly asks, calmly speaks, coolly answers, and ceases when he has no more to say, is in possession of some of the best requisites of conversation.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Character | Experience | Good | Judgment | Wisdom |
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.
Character | Conservatism | Effort | Men | Success |
The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of a God, reason clearly makes known to us, as has been shown. The knowledge of existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connection of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history.
Character | Existence | God | History | Intuition | Knowledge | Man | Memory | Mind | Reason | World | God |
Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
Character | Effort | Understand |
Our concepts of the empirical world are fundamentally controlled by the character of our perceptual experience and by the introspective access we enjoy to our own minds. Thus our concepts of consciousness are constrained by the specific form of our own consciousness, so that we cannot form concepts for quite alien forms of consciousness possessed by other actual and possible creatures. Similarly, our concepts of the body, including the brain, are constrained by the way we perceive these physical objects; we have, in particular, to conceive of them as spatial entities essentially similar to other physical objects in space... But now these two forms of conceptual closure operate to prevent us from arriving at concepts for the property or relation that intelligibly links consciousness to the brain. For, first, we cannot grasp other forms of consciousness, and so we cannot grasp the theory that explains these other forms: that theory must be general, but we must always be parochial in our conception of consciousness. It is as if we were trying for a general theory of light but only could grasp the visible part of the spectrum. And, second, it is precisely the perceptually controlled conception of the brain that we have which is so hopeless in making consciousness an intelligible result of brain activity. No property we can ascribe to the brain on the basis of how it strikes us perceptually, however inferential the ascription, can be the crucible from which subjective consciousness emerges fully formed. That is why the feeling is so strong in us that there has to be something magical about the mind-brain relation.
Body | Character | Consciousness | Experience | Light | Mind | Property | Space | Wisdom | World |
Proverbs are the condensed wisdom of long experience in brief, epigrammatic form, easily remembered and always ready for use. They are the alphabet of morals; and are commonly prudential watchwords and warnings, and so lean toward a selfish view of life.