This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury
Charity should be the habit of our estimates; kindness of our feelings; benevolence of our affections; cheerfulness of our social intercourse; generosity of our living; improvement of our progress; prayer of our desires; fidelity of our sex-examination; being and doing good of our entire life.
Benevolence | Character | Charity | Cheerfulness | Feelings | Fidelity | Generosity | Good | Habit | Improvement | Kindness | Life | Life | Prayer | Progress |
Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele
It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn.
Character | Circumstances | Existence | Life | Life | Will | Youth | Youth | Afraid |
He who gives what he would readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice.
Character | Generosity | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice |
How people think, relate and react to their circumstances, not what the circumstances are, is what determines their realities.
Character | Circumstances | People |
Without earnestness no man is ever great or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant; entertaining, popular; but he will want weight.
Earnestness | Man | Men | Will | Wisdom |
Save a part of your income and begin now, for the man with a surplus controls circumstances and the man without a surplus is controlled by circumstances.
Circumstances | Man | Surplus | Wisdom |
It is our relation to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
Circumstances | Influence | Wisdom |
To keep from gravitating toward genocidal conflict, we must stop demanding perpetual progress. For quiet nonpolitical reasons, governments and politicians cannot achieve the paradise they habitually promise. Political leaders who continue to dangle before their constituents enticing carrots that are becoming unattainable hasten the erosion of faith in political processes. Circumstances have ceased to be what they were when the once-New World’s myth of limitlessness made sense.
Circumstances | Faith | Myth | Paradise | Progress | Promise | Quiet | Sense | Wisdom | World |
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.
Circumstances | Extreme | Mankind | Right | Wisdom | Think |
Auguste Comte, formally Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte
The happiness of every man depends on the harmony between the development of his various faculties and the entire system of circumstances which govern his life.
Circumstances | Harmony | Life | Life | Man | System | Wisdom | Govern | Happiness |
The dead carry our thoughts to another and a nobler existence. They teach us, and especially buy all the strange and seemingly untoward circumstances of their departure from this life, that they and we shall live in a future state forever.
Circumstances | Existence | Future | Life | Life | Teach | Wisdom |
Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of man. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter
Circumstances | Man | Wisdom |
Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat.
Agitation | Body | Cause | Change | Circumstances | Disease | Fear | Heart | Hope | Influence | Mind | Pain | Pleasure | Rest | Wisdom | Wonder |
Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior.
Action | Behavior | Circumstances | History | Human nature | Mankind | Men | Nature | Nothing | Principles | Wisdom |
How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls, a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one’s children rich.
Children | Generosity | Luxury | Selfishness | Wife | Wisdom | World |
Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla
Your thoughts are the most powerful part of you. They actually create your world... It is from our thoughts that we systematically draw the people, places, and circumstances into our lives that eventually become our reality.
Circumstances | People | Reality | Wisdom | World |
John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
Belief | Generosity | God | Life | Life | Man | Mortal | Poverty | Power | Rights | Wisdom | World |
The Divine Mind communicates with the human mind through the imagination. A prayer, therefore, should be offered in the form of a mental image. Man must visualize the thing he desires, he must use his imaginative powers to form his petition in terms clearly outlined in his own mind. The profound concentration of attention and thought which this form of prayer requires fills also the heart with deep earnestness and devotion. Man must pray whole-heartedly as well as wholemindedly; he must believe in his heart that his well-being depends completely upon his prayer.
Attention | Devotion | Earnestness | Heart | Imagination | Man | Mind | Prayer | Thought | Wisdom | Thought |