This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Romance cannot be put into quantity production - the moment love becomes casual, it becomes commonplace.
That discipline which corrects the eagerness of worldly passions, which fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, which enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes to it matter of enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity than all the provisions which we can make of the goods of fortune.
Character | Discipline | Enjoyment | Fortune | Heart | Knowledge | Mind | Principles |
The aim and end of prayer is to revere, to recognize and to adore the sovereign majesty of God, through what he is in Himself rather than what he is in regard to us, and rather to love his goodness by the love of that goodness itself than for what it sends us.
The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.
George Villiers 2nd Duke of Buckingham
All true love is founded on esteem.
Through zeal knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal knowledge is lost; let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, Lady Blessington, born Margaret Power
There is no knowledge for which so great a price is paid as a knowledge of the world; and no one ever became an adept in it except at the expense of a hardened or a wounded heart.
Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness.
Character | Cheerfulness | Distinction | Mind |
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best a specious an ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a credible kind of ignorance, nothing more.
Better | Character | Idleness | Ignorance | Knowledge | Men | Nothing | Study |
The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.
Character | Earth | Expectation | Experience | Heaven | Love | Soul | Expectation | Friends |