This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Never let your persistence and passion turn into stubbornness and ignorance.
Ignorance | Passion | Persistence |
W. Macneile Dixon, fully William Macneile Dixon
The astonishing thing about the human being is not so much his intellect and bodily structure, profoundly mysterious as they are. The astonishing and least comprehensible thing about him is his range of vision; his gaze into the infinite distance; his lonely passion for ideas and ideals.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Even while we mourn the death of a loved one, there is room in our hearts for thankfulness for that life… Sober reflection can also lead us to a more sympathetic appreciation of the vital role death plays in the economy of life. Life’s significant and zest issue from our awareness of its transiency, its “fragile contingency.” The urge to create, the passion to perfect, the will to heal and cure – all the noblest of human enterprises grow in the soil of human mortality.
Appreciation | Awareness | Death | Life | Life | Mourn | Passion | Reflection | Thankfulness | Will | Appreciation | Awareness |
B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
No clear thinking is possible in a passion – any more than it is possible to see clearly through glasses that are covered with steam.
Where sorrow is concerned, not repression but expression is the wholesome discipline.
Discipline | Sorrow |
Ambition is not a reprehdnsible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined towards laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power.
Ambition | Glory | Laziness | Means | Men | Passion | Power | Ambition |
No passion or affection, with which we are born, can be in itself sinful; it becomes so, only by willful or careless indulgence.
Indulgence | Passion |
The world? It is a territory under a curse, where even its pleasures carry with them their thorns and their bitterness… A place where hope, regarded as a passion so sweet, renders everybody unhappy; where those who have nothing to hope for, think themselves still more miserable, where all that pleases, pleases never for long; and where ennui is always most the sweetest destiny and the most supportable that one can expect in it.
Bitterness | Destiny | Ennui | Hope | Nothing | Passion | World | Think |
The peace of God is peace within ourselves. The unrest of human life comes largely from our being torn asunder by contending impulses. Conscience pulls this way, passion that. Desire says, “Do this”; reason, judgment, prudence say “It is your peril if you do!” One desire fights against another. And so the man is rent asunder. There must be the harmonizing of all the being if there is to be real rest of spirit.
Conscience | Desire | God | Judgment | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Peace | Peril | Prudence | Prudence | Reason | Rest | Spirit | God |
A single word of gratefulness can transform a moment of sorrow into a moment of peace.