This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Baker
A career is born in public - talent in privacy.
There is nothing a man can less afford to leave at home than his conscience or his good habits; for it is not to be denied that travel is, in its immediate circumstances, unfavorable to habits of self-discipline, regulation of thought, sobriety of conduct, and dignity of character. Indeed, one of the great lessons of travel is the discovery how much our virtues owe to the support of constant occupation, to the influence of public opinion, and to the force of habit; a discovery very dangerous, if it proceed from an actual yielding to temptations resisted at home, and not from a consciousness of increased power put forth in withstanding them.
Character | Circumstances | Conduct | Conscience | Consciousness | Dignity | Discipline | Discovery | Force | Good | Habit | Influence | Man | Nothing | Occupation | Opinion | Power | Public | Regulation | Self | Thought | Yielding | Discovery |
The health of the soul is to have its faculties - reason, high spirit, and desire - happily tempered, with reason in command, and reining in both the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance.
Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than partyline line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians.
Aliveness | Better | Character | Children | Existence | Freedom | Good | Life | Life | Love | Money | Opinion | Public | Security | Will |
A moral decision is the loneliest thing that exists. Knowledge is shed abroad everywhere. Anybody may dip his cup into that great sea and take out what he can. It is a public appropriation from a public store. But what the man himself must do as a moral being, what ordering he shall make of his life, what allegiance he shall choose, what cause he shall cleave to - this is decided in that solitude where his soul in authentic presence lives with no other companion than the Final Authority which he recognizes as supreme.
Authority | Cause | Character | Decision | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Public | Solitude | Soul |
Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
Nothing in this life, after health and virtue, is more estimable than knowledge, nor is there anything so easily attained, or so cheaply purchased, the labor, only sitting still, and the expense but time, which, if we do not spend, we cannot save.
Character | Health | Knowledge | Labor | Life | Life | Nothing | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
We are too much inclined to underrate the power of moral influence, the influence of public opinion, and the influence of the principles to which great men - the lights of the world, and of the present age - have given their sanction.
Age | Character | Influence | Men | Opinion | Power | Present | Principles | Public | World |
The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.
Authority | Government | Opinion | People | Property | Public | Wisdom | Government |
Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Body | Health | Individual | Liberty | Man | Pleasure | Society | Wisdom | Happiness |