This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Men are more accountable for their motives, than for anything else; and primarily, morality consists in the motives, that is in the affections.
Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both actively working together.
Difficulty | People |
There are too many people praying for mountains of difficulty to be removed, when what they really need is courage to climb them.
Courage | Difficulty | Need | People |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
We have… two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach, but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach.
Those who worship gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in have at least one thing to plead in defensed of their idolatry - the power of their idol. It is true that, like other idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, nor understand; but, unlike other idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those she had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite.
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming its slave; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.
Association | Gold | Law | Men | Riches | Wealth | Will | World | Riches | Association |
Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence.
Association | Gold | Law | Men | Riches | Wealth | Will | World | Riches | Association |
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 |
There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quality that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the first, and Louis the Sixteenth, been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Circumstances | Danger | Difficulty | Man | Mediocrity | Wise | Yielding | Talent |
In pulpit eloquence, the grand difficulty lies here; to give the subject all the dignity it so fully deserves, without attaching any importance to ourselves.
Difficulty | Dignity |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The superior man makes the difficulty to be over come his first interest; success comes only later.
Difficulty | Man | Success |
As one whose husband and mother-in-law have both died the victims of murder assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder.
Death | Evil | Husband | Justice | Law | Life | Life | Morality | Mother | Murder | Retaliation | Murder |
Virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.
Difficulty | Struggle | Virtue | Virtue |