This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
None are known to be good until they have opportunity to be bad.
Good | Opportunity |
Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand.
Distinction | Men | Opportunity | Talent |
Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other; it warns us with a voice tht even the sagest discredit too long, and the silliest believe too late. Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it; he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.
Ambition | Desire | Dread | Enemy | Fear | Friend | Grave | Hope | Little | Opportunity | Repentance | Time | Will | Wisdom | Wise |
He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice should go a little further, and try to plant a virtue in its place; otherwise he will have his labor to renew. A strong soil that has produced weeds may be made to produce wheat with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
Cost | Difficulty | Energy | Enough | Labor | Little | Nothing | Virtue | Virtue | Will | Vice |
There are circumstances of peculiar difficulty and danger, where a mediocrity of talent is the most fatal quality that a man can possibly possess. Had Charles the first, and Louis the Sixteenth, been more wise or more weak, more firm or more yielding, in either case they had both of them saved their heads.
Circumstances | Danger | Difficulty | Man | Mediocrity | Wise | Yielding | Talent |
In pulpit eloquence, the grand difficulty lies here; to give the subject all the dignity it so fully deserves, without attaching any importance to ourselves.
Difficulty | Dignity |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
The superior man makes the difficulty to be over come his first interest; success comes only later.
Difficulty | Man | Success |
There is opportunity in every adversity, but it is only apparent when you look for it.
Adversity | Opportunity |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
The man who grasps an opportunity as it is paraded before him, nine times out of ten make a success; but the man who makes his own opportunities is, barring an accident, a sure-fire success!
Accident | Man | Opportunity | Success |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
The trouble with most of us is that we keep our eyes closed to opportunities that thrust themselves at us; and rare is the man who searches for his opportunity or sees one even when he stumbles over it.
Man | Opportunity | Trouble |
Virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.
Difficulty | Struggle | Virtue | Virtue |
Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he love us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
Adversity | Better | Difficulty | Love | Object | Skill | Will |
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
Freedom | Means | Opportunity | Will |
The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
Difficulty | Glory | Reputation |
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
Death | Difficulty | Inevitable | Life | Life | Present |
It will be found a work of no small difficulty to dispossess a vice from the heart, where long possession begins to plead prescription.
Difficulty | Heart | Will | Work | Vice |
The Occasion of the imagined Difficulty in conceiving disinterested Desires, has probably been from the attempting to define this simple Idea, Desire. It is called an uneasy Sensation in the absence of Good. Whereas Desire is as distinct from any Sensation, as the Will is from the Understanding or Senses. This every one must acknowledge, who speaks of desiring to remove Uneasiness or Pain.
Absence | Desire | Difficulty | Good | Pain | Understanding | Will |
Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living which give man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
Enough | Liberty | Man | Opportunity |
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
The difficulty in life is the choice.
Choice | Difficulty | Life | Life |