This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is no more important element in the formation of a virtuous character than a rightly directed sense of pleasure and dislike; for pleasure and pain are coextensive with life, and they exercise a powerful influence in promoting virtue and happiness in life.
Character | Important | Influence | Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Sense | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
Just as virtue is its own reward, so is vice its own punishment.
Punishment | Reward | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
The first virtue is, I think, to rule the tongue.
There are no two things so much talked of, and so seldom seen, as virtue and the funds.
In an age remarkable for good reasoning and bad conduct, for sound rules and corrupt manners, when virtue fills our heads, but vice our hearts; when those who would fain persuade us that they are quite sure of heaven, appear in no greater hurry to go there than other folks, but put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst; in an age when modesty herself is more ashamed of detection than delinquency; when independence of principle consists in having no principle on which to depend; and free thinking, not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking; in an age when patriots will hold anything except their tongues; keep anything except their word; and lose nothing patiently except their character; to improve such an age must be difficult; to instruct it dangerous; and he stands no chance of amending it who cannot at the same time amuse it.
Age | Chance | Character | Conduct | Detection | Good | Heaven | Hurry | Manners | Modesty | Nothing | Sound | Thinking | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |
It has been shrewdly said that when men abuse us, we should suspect ourselves, and when they praise us, them. It is a rare instance of virtue to despise censure which we do not deserve, and still more rare to despise praise, which we do. But that integrity that lives only on opinion would starve without it.
Abuse | Censure | Despise | Integrity | Men | Opinion | Praise | Virtue | Virtue |
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!
Angels | Better | Heart | Life | Life | Memory | Nature | Soul | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
Cost | Difficulty | Energy | Enough | Labor | Little | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |