This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every duty brings its peculiar delight, every denial its appropriate compensation, every thought its recompense, every love its elysium, every cross its crown; pay goes with performance as effect with cause. Meanness overreaches itself; vice vitiates whoever indulges it; the wicked wrong their own souls; generosity greatens; virtue exalts; charity transfigures; and holiness is the essence of angelhood. God does not require us to live on credit; he pays us what we earn as we earn it, good or evil, heaven or hell, according to our choice.
Cause | Character | Charity | Choice | Compensation | Credit | Duty | Evil | Generosity | God | Good | Heaven | Hell | Love | Meanness | Recompense | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Wrong | God | Thought | Vice |
The recognition of virtue is not less valuable from the lips of the man who hates it, since truth forces him to acknowledge it; and though he may be unwilling to take it into his inmost soul, he at least decks himself out in its trappings.
Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.
Character | Corruption | Enough | Knowledge | Virtue | Virtue |
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
Character | Cheerfulness | Wisdom |
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.
Character | Mediocrity | Soul | Virtue | Virtue |
Anger restrained is wisdom gained.
He who dies for virtue does not perish.
Not by age but by character is wisdom attained.
No virtue fades out of mankind. No over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.
Character | Despair | Experience | Mankind | Virtue | Virtue |