This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
" We must return teaching to the heart of the educational enterprise. Teaching needs to be supported, not only by rewarding excellence in teaching, but by placing the training of teachers at the center of our higher education system. If teaching is to become a prestigious profession, teachers must undergo rigorous training and hold prestigious degrees." - Elizabeth Dole, fully Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford "Liddy" Dole
"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business." - Michael J. Fox
"Success is about having, excellence is about being. Success is about having money and fame, but excellence is being the best you can be." - Mike Ditka, fully Michael Keller Ditka, Jr., aka "Iron" Mike Ditka
"Desire is the root of relationships based on utility or pleasure-desire for money, fame, or power, desire for bodily pleasure of one sort or another. In sharp contrast, in relationships based on the excellence of the persons involved, love is fundamental and is the root or source of whatever desire comes to exist." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"The slogan, “All children can learn,” not only signals a high priority on equality (which I initially rejected in favor of excellence) but, perhaps inadvertently suggests one on learning. Busy explaining why we might give priority to excellence over equality, we may overlook this second difficulty. Is the aim of schooling learning and only learning? Is the proof of our success as educators found, then, in proof of learning? Again the temptation is to respond, “What do you mean by learning?” And then we are off on a discussion of levels and kinds of learning, methods of evaluation, alternative pedagogies, and — wondrous new idea — authentic assessment." - Nel Noddings
"God is a model through which the excellence of man is to be estimated, whilst the abstract perfection of the human character is the type of the actual perfection of the divine." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the laws secure equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. "Neither is poverty a bar, for a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of his conditions. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourses we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not give him sour looks which, though harmless, are not pleasant." - Pericles NULL
"It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"In what area would excellence really have an extraordinary impact on the economic results of our business, to the point where it might transform the economic performance of the entire business?" - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars." - Plotinus NULL
"It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity." - Publius Syrus
"I think the definition of an artist is not necessarily tied into excellence or talent; an artist is somebody who, if you took away their freedom to make art, would lose their mind." - Richard Price
"Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise." - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality--one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. Finally, it is of such universal use that it can daily be seen at work and admired alike by simple or complex minds. Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole." - Richard Hofstadter
"To accomplish excellence or anything outstanding, you must listen to that whisper which is heard by you alone." - Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges
"Now, believe me, God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best." - Robert Collyer
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"The Romans assisted their allies and friends, and acquired friendships by giving rather than receiving kindness." - Sallust, full name Carus Valerius Sailustius Crispus NULL
"Buying, possessing, accumulating, this is not worldliness. - But doing this in the love of it, with no love to God paramount - doing it so that thoughts of God and eternity are an intrusion - doing it so that one's spirit is secularized in doing it - this is worldliness." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"Those who, in the confidence of superior capacities or attainments, neglect the common maxims of life, should be reminded that nothing will supply the want of prudence; but that negligence and irregularity, long continued will make knowledge useless, with ridiculous, and genius contemptible." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views." - Samuel Richardson
"The Railway [is] now the principal means of communication in all civilized countries. It has enhanced the celerity of time, and imparted a new series of conditions to every rank of life." - Samuel Smiles
"Be it desire or fear or anger or affection or friendship or even the desire for union, when directed towards the Lord, it brings the greatest blessing to the devotee. These bring about his union with the Lord." - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL
"And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster." - Stephan Jay Gould
"Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love (but only appreciate in some abstract sense). So let them all continue—the films, the books, the television programs, the zoos, the little half acre of ecological preserve in any community, the primary school lessons, the museum demonstrations, even […] the 6:00 A.M. bird walks. Let them continue and expand because we must have visceral contact in order to love. We really must make room for nature in our hearts." - Stephan Jay Gould
"No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!" - Thomas Carlyle
"The expedition of Messrs. Lewis and Clarke for exploring the river Missouri, and the best communication from that to the Pacific ocean, has had all the success which could have been expected." - Thomas Jefferson
"Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly very beautiful girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Act…is always identified with the fully complete, the actually present. Pure act, therefore, is simply a correlative of the immutable, i.e., of pure actualized form, complete in all that is proper to it and incorruptible. It is this immutability, self-sufficiency, and incorruptibility which for Aristotle is the primary characteristic of the “divine” and the perfect. In the notion of act so conceived there is no necessary implication of infinity, at least in the substantial order. In fact, Aristotle has no difficulty in admitting some fifty five of his prime movers, each one pure act or pure form but in virtue of its form distinct from all others. Substantial infinity would simply have no meaning in this Aristotelian universe" - W. Norris Clarke
"Human nature is said by many to be good; if so, where have social evils come from? For human nature is the only moral nature in that corrupting thing called "society." Every example set before the child of to-day is the fruit of human nature. It has been planted on every possible field — among the snows that never melt; in temperate regions, and under the line; in crowded cities, in lonely forests; in ancient seats of civilization, in new colonies; and in all these fields it has, without once failing, brought forth a crop of sins and troubles." - William Arthur
"A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing." - William Barclay
"Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into heaven let him be ever so holy." - William Blake
"We discovered birth control, and now it sterilizes the intelligent, multiplies the ignorant, debases love with promiscuity, frustrates the educator, empowers the demagogue, and deteriorates the race." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature to have his strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. He who plants a tree looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. Nothing could be less selfish than this." - Washington Irving
"The whole race is a poet that writes down the eccentric propositions of its fate." - Wallace Stevens
"On this principle of arrangement, the voice, uttered from the stage as from a center, and spreading and striking against the cavities of the different vessels, as it comes in contact with them, will be increased in clearness of sound, and will wake an harmonious note in unison with itself." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL
"I would say that the quality of each man’s life is the full measure of that man’s commitment of excellence and victory – whether it be football, whether it be business, whether it be politics or government or what have you." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That's real glory. That's the essence of it." - Vince Lombardi, fully Vincent Thomas "Vince" Lombardi
"There is a conscience in Man, a whispering right advice, restraining unjust hands which man has almost succeeded in silencing; but, it is the voice of God; it can never be made dumb. Make the children cognizant of it." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda
"Deviation from either truth or duty is a downward path, and none can say where the descent will end. - "He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little."" - Tryon Edwards
"But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone." - Thornton Wilder, fully Thornton Niven Wilder
"The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty." - Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen