This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In general, one cannot judge the true extent of a person’s fortune by outward appearances. The little a righteous man has may be far better than the noisy abundance in which many lawless delight. The modest possessions of a righteous man make him much happier than the great fortunes of many evildoers about which so much ado is made in the world.
Abundance | Better | Character | Fortune | Little | Man | Possessions | World |
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
An infallible way to make your child miserable is to satisfy all his demands. Passion swells by gratification; and the impossibility of satisfying every one of his wishes will oblige you to stop short at last after he has become headstrong.
Character | Impossibility | Passion | Will | Wishes | Child |
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Character | Imagination | Reality | World |
The man who listens is from the outset a spiritual being compared with the person who merely speaks, sees, and grasps. Hearing and taking in are spiritual activities: hearing the unchangeable, the untouchable, the incomprehensible, the constant, the eternal within the Melos. Only someone who listens can also recognize, interpret, think, speak, apprehend and comprehend.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
The idle man stands outside of God’s plan, outside of the ordained scheme of things; and the truest self-respect, the noblest independence, and the most genuine dignity; are not to be found there.
A man of integrity will never listen to any plea against conscience.
Character | Conscience | Integrity | Man | Will |
Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.
Character | Experience | Man |
Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.
What may be called “club-opinion” is one of the very strongest forces in life. The thief must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other debts in the world. The code of honor of fashionable society has throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one of our social selves.
Character | History | Honor | Life | Life | Opinion | Reason | Society | World | Society | Following |