This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Possessions are of no value unless they are used." - Aesop NULL
"This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation." - Alan Cohen
"This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation." -
"This sharpening of skills is the real value of competition. Many have lost sight of the purpose of healthy competition, which helps us to draw forth inner strength and encourages us to transcend our ideas of personal limitation. The real competition, however, is within the person, and not between people... In essence, competition is cooperation." -
"Nothing is inherently good or bad. Value is how we represent it to ourselves." - Anthony "Tony" Robbins
"Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore they imagine there is nothing it cannot buy... In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool." - Aristotle NULL
"Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately... They have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one’s life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward... They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it." - Aristotle NULL
"The ultimate value of life depends on awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival." - Aristotle NULL
"The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live - the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable - has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"Human life must be some kind of mistake… Existence has no real value in itself." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"A smile costs nothing but gives much. It enriches those who receive, without making poorer those who give. It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None is so rich or mighty that he can get along without it, and none is so poor but that he can be made rich by it. A smile creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in business, and is the countersign of friendship. It brings rest to the weary, cheer to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and it is nature's best antidote for trouble. Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away. Some people are too tired to give you a smile. Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as he who has no more to give." - Author Unknown NULL
"The value of anything is what the next days' memory of it shall be." - Author Unknown NULL
"If you really do put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price." - Author Unknown NULL
"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work - pride is the result." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value -- and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"The value of philosophy is to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. He who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thought and free them from the tyranny of custom." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"In the end the only way we can measure the value of our lives is by valuing the lives of others." - Blaise Pascal
"True friendship is like sound health, the value of it is seldom known until it be lost." - Charles Caleb Colton
"In the age of acorns, a single barleycorn had been of more value to mankind than all the diamonds in the mines of India." - Charles Caleb Colton
"No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it." - Charles Caleb Colton
"There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity." - Charles Caleb Colton
"True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The world’s salvation commenced in God’s heart, and is contained in the throb of every human heart that carries in it the beat of the heavenly pulse. And when our work is finished, the value that we have been to the world will have to be estimated by the amount of love-deposit we have been able to leave in the treasury of the world’s life." - Charles Henry Parkhurst
"Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it." -
"Of what value is smartness of speech? Opposing a man with the mouth excites anger." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"What gives life its value you can find - and lose. But never possess. This holds good above all for ‘the Truth about Life.’" - Dag Hammarskjöld
"There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune; it is a certain manner that distinguishes us, and which seems to destine us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves; it is by this quality that we gain the deference of other men, and it is this which commonly raises us more above them, than birth, rank, or even merit itself." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Decency - generosity - cooperation - assistance in trouble - devotion to duty; these are the things that are of greater value than surface appearances and custom." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"The bloom of human life is morality; whatever else we may possess, health and wealth, power, grace, knowledge, have a value only as they lead up to this, have a meaning only as they make this possible." - Felix Adler
"We work not only to produce but to give value to time." - Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
"Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"To risk one’s lfie is better than merelyl fearing death, but is still purely negative and so indeterminate and without value in itself." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Haven’t you noticed that people always exaggerate the value of things they haven’t got? The poor think they need nothing but riches to be quite happy and good. Everybody worships truth, purity, unselfishness, for the same reason: because they have no experience of them. Oh, if they only knew!" - George Bernard Shaw
"A friend’s only gift is himself, and friendship is not friendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does not terminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake. Such objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterranean and instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow from their ulterior effects and manifestations... We are not to look now for what makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found in friendship that may lend utility to life." - George Santayana
"Religion is the search for a value underlying all things, and as such is the most comprehensive of all the possible philosophies of life." - Gordon Willard Allport
"I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower into a truth." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home, and enables me to enjoy it better." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"When a men sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of the ounce." - Henry Ward Beecher