This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Interest makes some people blind and others quick-sided. We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears. Virtues are lost in interest, as rivers are swallowed up in the sea.
I can promise to be sincere, but I cannot promise to be impartial.
To forgive sin is not an act of injustice, though the punishment have been threatened. Even amongst men, though the promise of good bind the promiser; yet threats, that is to say, promises of evil, bind them not; much less shall they bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than men.
Character | Evil | God | Good | Injustice | Injustice | Men | Promise | Punishment | Sin | Forgive |
Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.
Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |
We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
Character | Childhood | Evil | Experience | Father | Good | Happy | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Promise | World | Youth | Child | Think |
It is a curious paradox that aversion of future harm seems more important than the promise of future benefit. That was not always true. Those who are unwilling to invent in the future haven’t earned one.
He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in its performance.
Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of busy life - serene, placid, and mild, with the impress of its great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.
Age | Grave | Life | Life | Peace | Promise | Quiet | Wisdom |
The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
Challenge | Dejection | Despair | Future | Life | Life | Promise | Success | Wisdom |
In the book of nature, where every emotional, mental and spiritual quality of humanity may find its correspondence and illustrations, flowers represent good affections. As the flower precedes the fruit, and gives notice of its coming, so good thoughts, affections and intentions precede and give promise of deeds in love to others.
Deeds | Good | Humanity | Love | Nature | Promise | Wisdom | Deeds |
In the whole range of human vision nothing is more attractive than to see a young man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor.
Duty | Life | Life | Man | Men | Nothing | Promise | Soul | Truth | Vision | Wisdom | World |
Submitting to the laws of any country, living quietly and enjoying privileges and protection under them, makes not a man a member of that society... Nothing can make any man so but his actually entering into it by positive engagement and express promise and compact.