This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptations we resist." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our strength grows out of our weakness." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Concentration is the secret of strength." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches and, to make knowledge valuable you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Majorities, the argument of fools, the strength of the weak." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength." - Ralph Washington Sockman
"Willpower should be understood to be the strength of mind which makes it capable of meeting success or failure with equanimity… Success develops arrogance, and the man’s spiritual progress is thus arrested. Failure, on the other hand, is beneficial, inasmuch as it opens the eyes of the man to his limitations and prepares him to surrender himself. Self-surrender is synonymous with eternal happiness. Therefore, one should try to gain the equipoise of mind under all circumstances: that is will-power." -
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart - the best brain. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is the eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so, with the use of suffering, men’s minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
"Creating the unity to run an effective business or a family or a marriage requires great personal strength and courage. No amount of technical administrative skill in laboring for the masses can make up for lack of nobility of personal character in developing relationships. It is a t a very essential, one-on-one level, that we live the primary laws of love and life." - Stephen Covey, fully Stephen Richards Covey
"If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"With ten characteristics was the earth created: wisdom and understanding; knowledge and strength; rebuke and might; righteousness and justice; mercy and compassion." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"We observe with confidence that the truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength; that here the sign of health is unconsciousness." - Thomas Carlyle
"The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder - a wait, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life, and, having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you." - Thomas Carlyle
"Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance." - Thomas Carlyle
"Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time, he will do it better, he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright." - Thomas Carlyle
"Make no vows to perform this or that; it shows not great strength, and makes thee ride behind thyself." - Thomas Fuller
"The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something – whatever you like – you will be on the way to knowing more about Him; that is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence; and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh
"Regimen is better than physic. Every one should be his own physician. We ought to assist, and not to force nature. Eat with moderation what agrees with your constitution. Nothing is good for the body but what we can digest. With medicine can procure digestion? Exercise. What will recruit strength? Sleep. What will alleviate incurable evils? Patience." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind." - William Hazlitt
"To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth." - William Hazlitt
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"There is only one object... for which we have at present the strength... and that is the moral object -the emancipation of ourselves from the inner slavery and spiritual degradation which assimilation has produced within us." - Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg
"If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"The principles of war, not merely one principle, can be condensed into a single word - "Concentration." But the truth this needs to be amplified as the concentration of strength against weakness. And for real value, it needs to be explained that the concentration of strength against weakness depends on the dispersion of your opponent's strength." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another." - Carson McClullers
"Men do not change their characters by uniting with one another, not does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with their strength." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"Whether happiness or unhappiness, freedom or slavery, in short whether good or evil results from an improved environment depends largely upon how the change has been brought about, upon the methods by which the physical results have been reached, and in what spirit and for what purpose the fruits of that change are used. Because a higher standard of living, a greater productiveness and a command over nature are not good in and of themselves do not mean that we cannot make good of them, that they cannot be a source of inner strength." - David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"
"The essential ingredient of democracy is not doctrine but intelligence, not authority but reason, not cynicism but faith in men, faith in God. Our strength lies in the fearless pursuit of truth by the minds of men who are free." - David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"
"It has become a conviction with me that psychology may in the long run do much to change the conception of the fundamental nature of the religious life, which, on the whole, is now too generally made a matter of doctrine. It is too intellectual At the doors of most churches one is met by required beliefs in a particular conception of God, in a speculative theory about the divinity of Christ, definite ideas concerning sin and salvation, the efficacy of ordinances, and the claims of supernatural revelation. What people are really seeking is access to refreshing fountains of life, sources of strength and guidance. They crave association with people and institutions which may convey to them a sense of what is most worthwhile in life and what may furnish impulsion toward real and enduring values. They know pretty well what those values are when allowed to let their own deepest desires express themselves. " -
"I believe in the possible realization of a world in which man can be much, even if he has little; a world in which the dominant motivation of existence is not consumption; a world in which "man" is the end, first and last; a world in which man can find the way of giving a purpose to his life as well as the strength to live free and without illusions." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The individual's greatest strength is based on the maximum of integration of his personality, and that means also on the maximum of transparence to himself. "Know thyself" is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way. " - Erik Erickson
"All through my life the counsel to depend on prayer has been prized above almost any other advice I have ever received. It has become an integral part of me, an anchor, a constant source of strength and the basis of my knowledge of things divine." - Ezra Taft Benson
"The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind." - Felix Frankfurter
"The wealth of rich feelings--the deep--the pure; With strength to meet sorrow, and faith to endure." - Frances S. Osgood
"The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be." - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving." - Franz Kafka
"He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself... The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"There would be no accumulation of strength inside if the choices that you make did not require disipline and intention." - Gary Zukav