This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is impossible to remove all desires. But we have the ability to channel our desires from physical and material pleasures to spiritual endeavors... Someone who finds fulfillment in spiritual matters is not being deprived of pleasure. Rather he is gaining more pleasure than is possible in material matters.
Ability | Fulfillment | Pleasure |
Stuart Cloete, fully Edward Fairly Stuart Graham
Happiness is a hard thing because it is achieved only by making others happy.
Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul
All of our controlling behavior - our anger, blame, pouting, teaching, explaining, caretaking, compliance, and denial - comes from believing that we can control what others think of us and how they treat us, and that how they think of us and treat us defines us.
Anger | Behavior | Blame | Character | Compliance | Control | Think |
Good-breeding is benevolence in trifles, or the preference of others to ourselves in the daily occurrences of life.
Benevolence | Character | Good | Life | Life | Preference | Trifles |
Howard Cosell, fully Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen
Courage takes many forms. there is physical courage, there is moral courage. Then there is a still higher type of courage - the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead.
Character | Courage | Day | Enthusiasm | Joy | Life | Life | Pain |
We communicate happiness to others not often by great acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, but by the absence of fault-finding and censure, by being ready to sympathize with their notions and feelings, instead of forcing them to sympathize with ours.
Absence | Censure | Character | Devotion | Fault | Feelings | Sacrifice | Self | Self-sacrifice | Happiness |
Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no other is, and to do what no other can do.
As character to be used for eternity must be formed in time and in good time, so good habits to be used for happiness in this life must be formed early; and then they will be a treasure to be desired in the house of the wise, and an oil of life in their dwellings.
Character | Eternity | Good | Life | Life | Time | Will | Wise | Happiness |
Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
He is best served who has no occasion to put the hand of others at the end of his arms.
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, born Soong Mei-ling or May-ling
In the end, we are all the sum total of our actions. Character cannot be counterfeited, nor can it be put on and cast off as if it were a garment to meet the whim of the moment. Like the markings on wood which are ingrained in the very heart of the tree, character requires time and nurture for growth and development. Thus also, day by day, we write our own destiny; for inexorably we become what we do. This I believe, is the supreme logic and the law of life.
Character | Day | Destiny | Growth | Heart | Law | Life | Life | Logic | Time |
We never know a greater character until something congenial to it has grown up within ourselves.
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others - and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.