This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The bravery founded on hope of recompense, fear of punishment, experience of success, on rage, or on ignorance of danger, is but common bravery, and does not deserve the name. True bravery proposes a just end; measures the dangers, and meets the result with calmness and unyielding decision.
Bravery | Calmness | Character | Danger | Decision | Experience | Fear | Hope | Ignorance | Punishment | Rage | Recompense | Success |
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 |
More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible.
Character | Means | Relationship |
Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror.
For most or even all forms of evil serve the Universe - much as the poisonous snake has it use - though in most cases their function is unknown. Vice itself has many useful sides: it brings about much that is beautiful, in artistic creations for example, and it stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security.
Love, hope and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, hate fear and grief, the family of pain; these mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, make and maintain the balance of the mind.
Art | Balance | Character | Family | Fear | Grief | Hate | Hope | Joy | Love | Mind | Pain | Pleasure |
I know of but one remedy against the fear of death that is effectual and that will stand the test of a sick-bed, or of a sound mind - that is, a good life, a clear conscience, an honest heart, and a well-ordered conversation; to carry the thoughts of dying men about us, and so to live before we die as we shall wish we had when we come to it.
Character | Conscience | Conversation | Death | Fear | Good | Heart | Life | Life | Men | Mind | Sound | Will |
Nothing is better than to search for the true God, even if the discovery of Him eludes human capacity, since the very wish to learn, if earnestly entertained, produces untold joys and pleasures.
Better | Capacity | Character | Discovery | God | Nothing | Search | Discovery |
The pinions of your soul will have power to still the untamed body. The creature will yield only to watchful, strenuous constancy of habit. Purify your soul from all undue hope and fear about earthly things, mortify the body, deny self - affections as well as appetites - and the inner eye will begin to exercise its clear and solemn vision.
Body | Character | Constancy | Fear | Habit | Hope | Power | Self | Soul | Vision | Will |
Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.