This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A man selects his enemies, his friends make themselves, and from these friends he is apt to suffer.
Go, wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense weigh thy opinion against providence.
Opinion | Providence | Sense | Wisdom |
Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste fore natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.
Childhood | Heart | Honor | Life | Life | Men | Progress | Regret | Taste | Time | Wealth | Wisdom | World |
The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste and that is annual variety.
Imagination | Perfection | Pleasure | Taste | Wisdom | Circumstance |
Every political society is composed of other smaller societies of different kinds, each of which has its interests and its rules of conduct: but those societies which everybody perceives, because they have an external and authorized form, are not the only ones that actually exist in the State... Unhappily personal interest is always found in inverse ratio to duty, and increases in proportion as the association grows narrower, and the engagement less sacred; which irrefragably proves that the most general will always the most just also, and that the voice of the people is in fact the voice of God.
Association | Conduct | Duty | God | People | Sacred | Society | Will | Wisdom | Association | Society | Engagement |
We do not know either unalloyed happiness or unmitigated misfortune. Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity; we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections as well as bodies, are in a perpetual flux.
Misfortune | Nothing | Purity | Taste | Wisdom | World | Happiness |
To be confined by the feet with friends is better than to walk in a garden with strangers.
A time of quietude brings things into proportion and gives us strength. We all need to take time from the busyness of living, even it be only 10 minutes to watch the sun go down or the city lights blossom against a canyoned sky. We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach toward the infinite. Time to be.
Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
Nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed among them and as the number of those possessing it is increased.
The more I consider the condition of the white men, the more fixed becomes my opinion that, instead of gaining, they have lost much by subjecting themselves to what they call the laws and regulations of civilized societies.