This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
François Mitterand, fully François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterand
I believe in the virtue of traditions, and I recall having often spoken this phrase: “Memory is revolutionary.” If one has the ambition of preparing the century to come, breaking with the past or being ignorant of its amounts to cutting one’s own roots and drying up on the spot.
John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
Knowledge is the one thing, virtue another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith.
Conscience | Faith | Good | Humility | Knowledge | Refinement | Sense | Virtue | Virtue |
We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him.
Capacity | Evil | God | Good | Man | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
To learn the whole Talmud is a great accomplishment; to learn one good virtue is even greater.
Accomplishment | Good | Virtue | Virtue | Learn |
Maximilien Robespierre, fully Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
If virtue be the spring of popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is the only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
Democracy | Government | Justice | Peace | Revolution | Terror | Virtue | Virtue | Wants | Government |
Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
The testing of good and bad is in order that the gold may boil and bring the scum to the top.
The existentialist insight, in part, is that meaning is something we give to life. We do not find meaning so much as throw ourselves at it. The Zen insight, in part, is that worrying about meaning may itself make life less meaningful than it might have been. Part of the virtue of the Zen attitude lies in learning to not need to be busy: learning there is joy and meaning and peace in simply being mindful, not needing to change or be changed. Let the moment mean what it will.
Change | Insight | Joy | Learning | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Peace | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Zen |
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
Teresa of Avila, aka Saint Teresa of Jesus, baptized as Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada NULL
A slight failing in one virtue is enough to pull all the others to sleep.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
People find happiness both in wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Contentment is no index of true worth.
Contentment | Folly | People | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom | Worth | Happiness |
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Punctuality | Virtue | Virtue |