This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little.
Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find their teams going the other way; every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote - justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.
Freedom | God | Honor | Justice | Knowledge | Love | Will | Work | God |
It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred.
Character | Honor | Man | Men | Opinion | Public | Self | Solitude | World |
What lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in bed and board; but let truth and love and honor and courtesy flow in all thy deeds.
The secret of genius is...first, last, midst, and without end to honor every truth by use.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animal-cule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity – all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.
Appetite | Doctrine | Eternity | God | Life | Life | Little | Omnipresence | Taste | World | God |
The secret of genius is… first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n.
Belief | Change | Courage | Daring | Energy | Events | Greatness | History | Man | Oppression | Time | Will | Work |
The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.
Experience | Honor | Practice | Reality | World |
Laws are like spiders' webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but are things break through and escape.
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
What is hell? To live in slavery to others. How is heaven attained? The attainment of heaven is the freedom from cravings. What is a person’s duty? To do good to all beings. What are worthless as soon as they are won? Honor and fame. What brings happiness? The friendship of the holy. What destroys craving? Realization of one’s true self. Who are our enemies? Our sense-organs, when they are uncontrolled. Who are our friends? Our sense-organs, when they are controlled. Who has overcome the world? He who has conquered his own mind.
Attainment | Duty | Fame | Freedom | Good | Heaven | Hell | Honor | Mind | Self | Sense | Slavery | World | Friendship |
Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court.
Glory | Honor | Little | Nature | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue |