This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All wise men share one trait in common: the ability to listen.
You know what makes leadership? It is the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do and like it.
In the concentration camp every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is "the last of human freedoms" - the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances."
Ability | Circumstances | Goals | Life | Life | Circumstance |
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Experience | Indispensable | Love | Mistake | People |
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter so much what you do in particular, so long as you're living your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
Ability | Contemplation | Dawn | Day | Expectation | Life | Life | Man | Contemplation | Expectation | Learn |
He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much master of the world as he who is ready to die.
The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain justice, to end the massive violence of war.
Ability | Better | Existence | Idealism | Justice | Men | Power | Unique | War |
The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.
The true measure of spirituality lies not in having visions of angels, but in the ability to make that unpleasant phone call.
Ability | Angels | Spirituality |