This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance.
Acquaintance | Character | Family | Lying | Merit | People | Temptation | Temptation |
The temptation is not here, where you are reading about it or praying about it. It is down in your shop among bales and boxes, ten-penny nails, and sand-paper.
Character | Reading | Temptation | Temptation |
Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.
Absence | Character | Temptation | Virtue | Virtue | Temptation |
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it.
Character | Culture | Malice | Temptation | Temptation |
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may.
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
A dimension is missing from ourselves and our culture which is reflected in our inability to reconcile the competing demands of our inner and outer lives. As a result, most of us make use of a very small portion of our possible consciousness and of our soul’s resources... The destiny of mankind depends on something as personal and intimate as the way each one of us chooses to live, think and behave.
Character | Consciousness | Culture | Destiny | Mankind | Soul | Think |
I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.
Admiration | Character | Excess | Love | Power | Strength | Suffering | Temptation | Tenderness | Terror | Weakness | Temptation |
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
Inherent in revivalism is the temptation to stress results and to justify whatever produces them.
Character | Justify | Temptation | Temptation |
Our culture needs a great deal more than a changed lifestyle. In the Western mind, thought-structures and the relationship between consciousness and matter are badly out of balance, so that our world has become wholly pervaded by a materialism that is threatening to squash us to death. We are in a state of materialistic hypertrophy, and our eventual self-destruction would in fact be no more than the logical consequence of our attitudes.
Balance | Character | Consciousness | Culture | Death | Materialism | Mind | Relationship | Self | Thought | World |
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphans - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Battle | Care | Character | Charity | Firmness | God | Malice | Nations | Peace | Right | Work | God |
One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
Character | Metaphysics | Temptation | Temptation |