This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Active beneficence is a virtue of easier practice than forbearance after having conferred, or than thankfulness after having received a benefit. I know not, indeed, whether it be a greater and more difficult exercise of magnanimity for the one party to act as if he had forgotten, or for the other as if he constantly remembered the obligation.
Character | Forbearance | Magnanimity | Obligation | Practice | Thankfulness | Virtue | Virtue |
Whatever a person does without enthusiasm and joy is not truly considered doing. When a person lacks joy for what he is doing, everything he does will be difficult for him and he will not do it properly.
Character | Enthusiasm | Joy | Will |
Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disc of eternity with a dollar and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.
Envy is such a part of many people’s personalities that it is not reasonable to expect them to completely eradicate this trait. Rather, they should channel it in a positive direction. Let them envy those with wisdom so they will try to gain more wisdom.
Thousands of men breathe, move, and live, pass off the stage of life, and are heard of no more. Why? they do not partake of good in the world, and none were blessed by them; none could point to them as the means of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spake, could be recalled; and so they perished: their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storm of time can never destroy. Write your name, in kindness, love, and mercy, on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year: you will never be forgotten. No! your name, your deeds, will be as legible on the hearts you leave behind you as the stars on the brow of evening. Good deeds will shine as the stars of heaven.
Character | Darkness | Deeds | Good | Life | Life | Light | Man | Means | Men | Redemption | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Deeds | Blessed |
G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality... only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
Art | Character | Common Sense | Ecstasy | Life | Life | Means | Rationality | Sense | Spirit | Art |
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, aka Lord Clarendon
Anger is the most impotent passion that accompanies the mind of man; it effects nothing it goes about; and hurts the man who is possessed by it more directly than any other against whom it is directed.
Canassatego Treaty of Lancaster NULL
You who are so wise must know that different nations have different conceptions of things. You will not therefore take it amiss if our ideas of the white man’s kind of education happens not to be the same as yours. We have had some experience with it. Several of our young people were brought up in your colleges. They were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger. They didn’t know how to build a cabin, take a deer, or kill an enemy. They spoke our language imperfectly. They were therefore unfit to be hunters, warriors, or counselors; they were good for nothing. We are, however, not less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it. To show our gratefulness, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care with their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.
Care | Character | Education | Enemy | Experience | Good | Hunger | Ideas | Kill | Language | Man | Means | Men | Nations | Nothing | People | Will | Wise |
The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting a child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction wit the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.
Body | Character | Justice | Mercy | Prison | Right | Society | Will | Wit | Wrong | Society | Child |