This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In general the character tradition assumes that institutions such as families, schools, and long-lived organizations will act more wisely than individuals and also that individuals who have lived through a variety of experiences have learned things that many young people do not yet know.
Abigail Van Buren, pen name for Pauline Phillips and now daughter Jeanne Phillips
The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape.
The common character of all evil is that its realization in fact involves that there is some concurrent realization of a purpose towards elimination. The purpose is to secure the avoidance of evil. The fact of the instability of evil is the moral order in the world.
Character | Evil | Instability | Order | Purpose | Purpose | World |
Only what we have wrought into our character during life can we take way with us.
If thinking is perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.
Character | Mind | Object | Sense | Soul | Thinking | Thought |
Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is our actions - what we do - that we are happy or the reverse.
Action | Character | Happy | Imitation | Life | Life | Qualities | Tragedy | Happiness |
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.
Character | Good | Men | Nothing | Understanding | Wealth | Value |
Anne Frank, fully Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank
How true Daddy’s words were when he said: “All children must look after their own upbringing.” Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.
Advice | Character | Children | Good | Parents | Right | Words |