This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
François Guizot, fully François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
The study of art is a taste at once engrossing and unselfish, which may be indulged without effort, and yet has the power of exciting the deepest emotions - a taste able to exercise and to gratify both the nobler and softer parts of our nature.
Art | Effort | Emotions | Nature | Power | Study | Taste | Art |
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power and is often, in point of fact, useless. Just as a leader doesn't need intelligence, a man in my job doesn't need too much of it either.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!
Faith | Imagination |
If spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.
Change | Expectation | God | Men | Necessity | Nothing | Power | Silence | Sound | Wonder | Expectation |
Morality... must have the more power over the human heart the more purely it is exhibited. Whence it follows that, if the law of morality and the image of holiness and virtue are to exercise any influence at all on our souls, they can do so only so far as they are laid to heart in their purity as motives, unmixed with any view to prosperity, for it is in suffering that they display themselves most nobly.
Display | Heart | Influence | Law | Morality | Motives | Power | Prosperity | Purity | Suffering | Virtue | Virtue |
The poor don't know their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
Generosity | Life | Life |
Medical doctors strike me as ignorant as to how a healthy body works. They know how to control or repair some diseased bodies, but their medicine is often worse than the disease. And what about the pressure and competitiveness of the pharmaceutical industry and the make-profits-quick motives of the food corporations? Medical doctors put little or no emphasis on nutrition, exercise and energy balance. They are paid when we are sick, not when we are well.
Balance | Body | Control | Disease | Energy | Industry | Little | Motives |
If men gave three times as much attention as they now do to ventilation, ablution, and exercise in the open air, and only one third as much to eating, luxury, and late hours, the number of doctors, dentists, and apothecaries, and the amount of neuralgia, dyspepsia, gout, fever, and consumption would be changed in corresponding ratio.
Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.
Heart | Man | Occupation | Work |
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work, to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise, but above all - by example.
Education | Example | Kindness | Literature | Lust | Means | People | Praise | Precept | Training | Warning | Work | Youth | Youth |
A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility - these only, denominate men great and glorious.
Contemplation | God | Good | Humility | Mankind | Men | Contemplation |
The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life is the ascertainment of truth.
Life | Life | Occupation | Truth | Intellect |
To live is to feel ourselves fatally obliged to exercise our liberty, to decide what we are going to be in this world. Not for a single moment is our activity of decision allowed to rest. Even when in desperation we abandon ourselves to whatever may happen, we have decided not to decide.
Decision | Desperation | Liberty | Rest | World |
Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.
Choice | Circumstances | Conduct | Conformity | Eccentricity | Feelings | Growth | Mind | Nature | Peculiarity | People | Pleasure | Taste | Thought | Wishes | Following | Thought |
Customs are made for customary circumstances; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism. [And] I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized.
Choice | Circumstances | Conduct | Conformity | Eccentricity | Force | Individuality | Nature | Peculiarity | People | Pleasure | Right | Taste | Thought | Following | Thought |
The contemplation of the divine Being, and the exercise of virtue, are in their own nature so far from excluding all gladness of heart, that they are perpetual sources of it.
Contemplation | Heart | Nature | Virtue | Virtue | Contemplation |
From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor.
Ideas | Life | Life | Mind | Understanding |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Culture is a massive exercise in restraint, inhibition, and curtailment of joy on behalf of pseudo-safety and grim necessities. We live out our lives in the long shadows it casts.