This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Appreciation | Beauty | Betrayal | Better | Children | Life | Life | People | Respect | World | Appreciation | Respect |
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative possibilities.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Mistake |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Wisdom consists in the ability to discriminate between the probable and improbable, and in being reconciled to the inevitable.
Ability | Inevitable | Wisdom |
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Ability | Confidence | Education | Self | Self-confidence | Temper |
Perhaps more than any other single factor, the intimate alchemy between the healer and the patient helps mobilize the body's natural resources. The mere presence of a healer often evokes hope in the patient and an expectation of recovery. When the two people create a partnership based on compassion, trust, and shared decision-making, and when the relationship nurtures the patient's hope for a positive outcome, even seemingly incurable diseases sometimes go into remission.... insistently restoring the human heart to the practice of medicine. Rather than treating patients as disease processes, they risk bringing their full humanness to the therapeutic encounter. They not only call on their technological expertise, but on the inner qualities practiced by healers from time immemorial: patience, humility, compassion, and an ability to inspire and mobilize their patients' healing resources.
Ability | Alchemy | Body | Compassion | Decision | Disease | Expectation | Heart | Hope | Humility | Patience | People | Practice | Qualities | Relationship | Risk | Time | Trust | Expectation |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
Both bondage and liberation are the fictions of our ignorance. They do not really exist in the Atman. Just as a piece of rope remains rope, whether or not we mistake it for a snake. The imagined snake does not really exist in the rope. The Atman is infinite, without parts, beyond action... There is neither birth nor death, neither bound nor aspiring soul, neither liberated soul nor seeker after liberation - this is the ultimate and absolute truth.
Absolute | Action | Birth | Death | Ignorance | Mistake | Soul | Truth |
A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.
Ability |
The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves “inside the skin” of the other.
Ability | Compassion | Love | Suffering | Understanding |
The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.