This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Diana Vreeland, born Diana Dalziel
Your world... you have created it for yourself, it is real to yourself, and therefore real to us... It is for you to discover yourself in a world where, alone and free, you may dream the possible dream: that the wondrous is real, because that is how you feel it to be, how you wish it to be... and how you wish it into being.
Isaac Abravanel, fully Don Itshak ben Yehouda Abravanel
The reward of the souls in the world beyond is their ability to attain the true concept of God which is a source of the most wonderful felicity, an attainment impossible for man in this early life because of the disturbances on the part of matter.
Ability | Attainment | God | Life | Life | Man | Reward | Wisdom | World | God |
Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
To be of use in the world is the only way to be happy.
Those who get through the world without enemies are commonly three classes: the supple, the adroit, the phlegmatic. The leaden rule surmounts obstacles by yielding to them; the oiled wheel escapes friction; the cotton sack escapes damage by its impenetrable elasticity.
Be not content with the commonplace in character anymore than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.
Ambition | Attainment | Character | Conscience | Heart | Impression | Power | Will | World | Ambition |
Confidence is a thing not to be produced by compulsion. Men cannot be forced into trust.
Character | Confidence | Men | Trust |
To say that people have a moral sense is not the same thing as saying that they are innately good. A moral sense must compete with other senses that are natural to humans - the desire to survive, acquire possessions, indulge in sex, or accumulate power - in short, with self-interest narrowly defined. How that struggle is resolved will differ depending on our character, our circumstances, and the cultural and political tendencies of the day. But saying that a moral sense exists is the same thing as saying that humans, by their nature, are potentially good.
Character | Circumstances | Day | Desire | Good | Nature | People | Possessions | Power | Self | Self-interest | Sense | Struggle | Will |
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?