This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Intemperance is the pestilence which killeth pleasure; temperance is not the flail of pleasure; it is the seasoning thereof.
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.
Human race | Race |
Variety in poetry breeds self-indulgence; in gymnastics, disease: simplicity there puts temperance in the soul; here it puts health in the body.
Health | Poetry | Simplicity |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?… It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.
Accident | Beauty | Birth | Cleanliness | Harm | Intelligence | Life | Life | Little | Man | Mind | Mortal | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Soul | Wonder | Beauty |
Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
Cheerfulness | Diligence | Strength | Will |
I consider the temperance cause the foundation of all social and political reform.
Cause |
Saint Ambrose, born Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
The pious mind distinguishes between what is written with reference to the deity and with reference to the flesh, and thus avoids sacrilege.
Abstinence | Body | Desire | Prodigality | Soul | Spirit | Teacher |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
There are often two characters of a man--that which is believed in by people in general, and that which he enjoys among his associates. It is supposed, but vainly, that the latter is always a more accurate approximation to the truth, whereas in reality it is often a part which he performs to admiration: while the former is the result of certain minute traits, certain inflexions of voice and countenance, which cannot be discussed, but are felt as it were instinctively by his domestics and by the outer world. The impressions arising from these slight circumstances he is able to efface from the minds of his constant companions, or from habit they have ceased to observe them.
Ambrose, aka Saint Ambrose, fully Aurelius Ambrosius NULL
The pious mind distinguishes between what is written with reference to the deity and with reference to the flesh, and thus avoids sacrilege.
Abstinence | Body | Desire | Prodigality | Soul | Spirit | Teacher |
Justice is the constitution or fundamental law of the moral universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man in all his moral relations. Accordingly all human affairs must be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal gravitation towards the eternal right.
Absolute | Balance | Blessedness | Eternal | Man | Mankind | Rights | World |
We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
Cleanliness | Duty | Glory | Practice | Prosperity | Public | Sincerity | Time | Old |
You ask that Mr. Taft shall let the world know what his religious belief is. This is purely his own private concern; it is a matter between him and his Maker, a matter for his own conscience; and to require it to be made public under penalty of political discrimination is to negative the first principles of our Government, which guarantee complete religious liberty, and the right to each to act in religious affairs as his own conscience dictates. Mr. Taft never asked my advice in the matter, but if he had asked it, I should have emphatically advised him against thus stating publicly his religious belief. The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.
Ability | Business | Cleanliness | Courage | Duty | Good | Honesty | Intention | Man | Men | People | Public | Qualities | Righteousness | Truth | Weakness | Will | Work | Business |
Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
When a miner looks at the rope that is to lower him into the deep mine, he may coolly say, "I have faith in that rope as well made and strong." But when he lays hold of it, and swings down by it into the tremendous chasm, then he is believing on the rope. Then he is trusting himself to the rope. It is not a mere opinion--it is an act. The miner lets go of everything else, and bears his whole weight on those well braided strands of hemp. Now that is faith.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt
It is resignation and contentment that are best calculated to lead us safely through life. Whoever has not sufficient power to endure privations, and even suffering, can never feel that he is armor proof against painful emotions,--nay, he must attribute to himself, or at least to the morbid sensitiveness of his nature, every disagreeable feeling he may suffer.
Body |
The fact that political ideologies are tangible, active realities does not prove their necessity. The bubonic plague was an extremely potent social reality. But nobody would have argued that, because it existed, it was necessary and nothing should be done about it.
Behavior | Character | Cleanliness | Energy | Enthusiasm | Force | Politics | Will | Work |
How cold the vacancy when the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist first sees reality. The mortal no has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
Cleanliness | Death | God | Heaven | God |
Dhyan is not an activity but a state of being, a dimension of being. It is a state of motionlessness where the ego is dissolved and you have let it be dissolved, where there is no experiencing but only a state of non-knowing, non-doing. Some have described it as the dark night of the soul. There is no tension at all in this state; the space within is being activated. It is a very delicate state that has to be looked after. You need to be alone then and need time to adjust to it.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Age | Cleanliness | Extravagance | Genius |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.
Absolute | Cleanliness | Contemplation | Love | Means | Men | Reading | System | Woman | Words | World | Contemplation |