This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another, and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Prayer should be regarded as practice of the Presence of God... Man prays not only that God should remember Him, but also that he should remember God... Prayer is an effort of man to reach God, to commune with an invisible being, creator of all things, supreme wisdom, truth, beauty, and strength, father and redeemer of each man.
Beauty | Effort | Father | God | Man | Practice | Prayer | Strength | Truth | Wisdom | God |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.
A nickname is the heaviest stone the devil can throw at a man.
No consenting soul can be made to sin, and so sin is inexcusable.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience. We cannot dodge this challenge without renouncing our highest moral pretentions.
Challenge | Conscience | Pride | Sin |
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.
Life | Life | Man | Pride | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Work | Value |
Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may be talked of.
What a chimera, then, is man!... the pride and refuse of the universe!
Love may exist without jealousy, although this is rare: but jealousy may exist without love, and this is common; for jealousy can feed on that which is bitter no less than on that which is sweet, and is sustained by; pride as often as by affection.
There is a diabolical trio existing in the natural man, implacable, inextinguishable, co-operative and consentaneous, pride, envy, and hate; pride that makes us fancy we deserve all the goods that others possess; envy that some should be admired while we are overlooked; and hate, because all that is bestowed on others, diminishes the sum we think due to ourselves.
To know a man, observe how he wins his object, rather than how he loses it; for when we fail, our pride supports; when we succeed, it betrays us.