This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Pleasure comes from obtaining what we feel we are lacking. We have the ability to choose our answer to the question, “What am I lacking right now?” Some people answer materialistically. It is wiser to choose to focus on your lack of spiritual accomplishments and then you can derive pleasure from meeting those needs.
Ability | Character | Focus | People | Pleasure | Question | Right |
The dominant vocation of all human beings at all times is living - intellectual and moral growth.
It is a welcome symptom in an age which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere. This proves that knowledge and justice are ranked above wealth and power by a large section of the human race.
Age | Character | Goals | Human race | Justice | Knowledge | Men | Power | Race | Wealth |
Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke
Live by admiration rather than disgust. Judge people by their best, not by their worst.
Admiration | Character | People |
It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he - with his specialized knowledge - more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person.
Character | Good | Knowledge | Sense | Understanding |
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion: a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
Character | Discernment | Knowledge | Soul |
The best reward of a kindly deed is the knowledge of having done it.
No person sees all of his faults. Every person considers himself righteous an feels whatever he does is correct. For every act a person does, he has a thousand excuses and rationalizations. A person does not see what goes against his prejudices. Other people can be much more objective about you and can find your wrongdoings and faults. Hence, be willing to listen to what an admonisher has to say.
George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from the serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle.
Character | Grief | Life | Life | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Struggle | Thought | Thought | Understand |
You can't stop the people from thinking - but you can start them.
Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead, choose death because we cannot forget quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings; remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do this, the way lies open to a new paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
Character | Death | Humanity | Knowledge | Paradise | Progress | Rest | Risk | Wisdom |
Some people regret that they have poor memories. Alas! it is much more difficult to forget.