This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.
Choice | Culture | Failure | Family | Good | Heaven | Occupation | Position | Success | Thought | Failure | Old | Thought |
The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.
Success |
One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favor of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Charity | Courage | Experience | Perfection | Success | Taste | Will | Happiness | Understand |
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
Applause | Error | Life | Life | Logic | Perfection | Success |
A humble man can do great things with an uncommon perfection, because he is no longer concerned about incidentals like his own interests and his own reputation, and therefore he no longer needs to waste his efforts in defending them
Care | Good | Inattention | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Success |
I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything — without refutation — without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening.
I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both.
Success |
The declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary to every principle of moral justice.
Danger | Principles | Success | Danger |
Thomas L. Friedman, fully Thomas Lauren Friedman
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a non-corrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.
Business | Individual | Progress | Success | Business |
Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
There is no need to fight old habits. Start new ones. It is the resisting of an old habit that puts you in that trench.
In truth until within the last ten or twelve years an Irish author never thought of publishing in his own country, and the consequence was that our literary men followed the example of our great landlords; they became absentees, and drained the country of its intellectual wealth precisely as the others exhausted it of its rents. Thus did Ireland stand in the singular anomaly of adding some of her most distinguished names to the literature of Great Britain, whilst she herself remained incapable of presenting anything to the world beyond a school-book or a pamphlet; and even of the latter it is well known that if the subject of it were considered important, and its author a man of any talent or station in society, it was certain to be published in London.
Creed | Existence | Life | Life | People | Success | Truth |
I would not enter in my list of friends, who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail that crawls at evening in the public path, but he has the humanity, forewarned, will tread aside, and let the reptile live.
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
All we hear is “What’s the matter with the country?” “What’s the matter with the world?” There ain’t but one thing wrong with every one of us in the world, and that’s selfishness.
Success |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
The sales tax is the best and most equitable tax. The gasoline tax, which is nothing but a sales tax, has proven painless, productive and punitive. Everything we buy should have its equal proportion of tax, outside of cheap food and cheap clothes.
Success |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
When you figure it right down, none of us are in a really essential business but the farmer, and he raises so much that even his business is partly non-essential.
Success |