This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life... The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind.
Art | Books | Character | Duty | Enjoyment | Glory | Life | Life | Mankind | Men | Order | Rest | Service | Talent |
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned three things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind. Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful and miraculous treasure in the world. Fulfillment of duty is another beautiful thing, making life happy and giving to the soul an unconquerable force to sustain ideals. This is my second conviction, and my third is that cruelty, hatred, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral or material millennium.
Character | Convictions | Cruelty | Duty | Force | Fulfillment | Future | Giving | Happy | Heart | Ideals | Injustice | Injustice | Life | Life | Mind | Soul | Will | World |
Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
There is one person whom it is my duty to make good and that is myself.
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
The envious man is in pain upon all occasions which ought to give him pleasure. The relish of his life is inverted; and the objects which administer the highest satisfaction to those who are exempt from this passion give the quickest pangs to persons who are subject to it. All the perfections of their fellow creatures are odious. Youth, beauty, valor and wisdom are provocations of their displeasure. What a wretched and apostate state is this! to be offended with excellence, and to hate a man because we approve him!
Beauty | Character | Excellence | Hate | Life | Life | Man | Pain | Passion | Pleasure | Valor | Valor | Wisdom | Youth |
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable with himself.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass… I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth… The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Character | Inferiority | Man | Right | Superiority | Wrong |
Alexandre Vinet, fully Alexandre Rodolphe Vinet
Religion finds the love of happiness and the principles of duty separated in us; and its mission - its masterpiece is, to reunite them.
Character | Duty | Love | Mission | Principles | Religion | Happiness |
Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
Duty | Law | Liberty | Life | Life | Property | Right | Rights | Wisdom |
There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us ever.
Character | Consciousness | Duty | Evil | Sense |
Bernard Baruch, fully Bernard Mannes Baruch
Government is not a substitute for people, but simply an instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument.
Duty | Government | Individual | People | Wisdom | Government |
Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God”; for that, and that alone, is peace.
Day | Duty | God | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Peace | Prayer | Supplication | Trust | Wisdom | God |
The moment you can make a very simple discovery, viz., that obligation to God is your privilege, and is not imposed as a burden, your experience will teach you many things - that duty is liberty, that repentance is a release from sorrow, that sacrifice is gain, that humility is dignity, that the truth from that which you hide is a healing element that bathes your disordered life, and that even the penalties and terrors of God are the artillery only to protection to His realm.
Dignity | Discovery | Duty | Experience | God | Humility | Liberty | Life | Life | Obligation | Repentance | Sacrifice | Sorrow | Teach | Truth | Will | Wisdom | God |